Walden And Other Writings Of Henry David Thoreau

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THE MODERN LIBRARY

OF THE W O R L D* S BEST B O O K B

WALDEN

AND OTHER WRITINGS OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Ti.e publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an
illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of
THE MODEUN hJ BRABY^and listing each colume
in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has
been looking for, hanfisomely printed, in unabridged
editions f and at an unusually low price.

AND OTHER WRITINGS OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,

BY BROOKS ATKINSON

FOREWORD BY TOWNSEND SCUDDER
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, SWARTHMORE COLI.FGF

THE MODERN LIBRART ■ NEfE YORK

Copyright^ J^a7ido?n House^ Inc,

RuTldoTIl House is the publisher of

THE MODERN LIBRARY

BENNETT A. CERE • DONATED S. KI-OPFER - ROBERT K, HAAS

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAG»

Forewot^d by Townsend Scudder vii

Introduction by Brooks Atkinson ix

VValden ^

P^conomy ^

Where 1 Lived, and What I Lived For 73

Reading qo

Sounds loi

Solitude 1 1 7

Visitors 127

The Bean-Field 140

The Village 151

The Ponds 157

Baker Farm 18 1

Higher Laws i8cv

Brute Neighbors 201

Plouse-Warining 214

Former Inhabitants; iiid Winter Visitors 23c

Winter Animals 24^

The Fond in Winter 253

Spring 267

Conclusion 285

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 301
Concord River 301

Saturday 307

Sunday 321

Rumors from an iFolian Harp 363

The At hint ides 372

The Inward Morning 401

Thursday 404

V

Vi

CONTENTS

Friday

VAGE

414

The Poet’s Delay

422

Cape Cod

439

The Shipwreck

439

The Wellfleet Oysterman

448

The Highland Light

466

Provincetown

488

The Allegash and East Branch

505

Walking

597

Civil Disobedience

63 s

Slavery in Massachusetts

663

A Plea for Captain John Brown

683

Life Without Principle

711

FOREWORD
By Townsend Scudder

Thoreau has for today a special appeal. In our insecure,
nervous, anxious present, when half the world yields to the
anti-democratic theory that the individual must offer body
and soul to the State, it is heartening to find in Thoreau the
opposite opinion. When everywhere government tends to tres-
pass on the individual’s freedom, it is good to find a champion
of the belief that a man of conscience is at liberty to follow
his own convictions. While technological skill works hour by
hour to increase the complexity of existence, it is worth re-
calling Thoreau ’s determination to make his practical living
as simple as possible the better to enjoy life’s values. As our
man-made world grows increasingly too much with us, what a
relief to visit with Thoreau the woods and ponds and streams
he loves to explore.

These factors help to account for the present widespread in-
terest in the author of Walden. Yet at any time and under any
terms — once the reader becomes initiated — ^Thoreau makes
excellent company. To win the acquaintance of so prov jcative
a thinker is worth a little effort. A little effort — for the un-
wary venturer is due for some shocks. Not until he accepts
Thoreau for what he is may a reader consider himself ready.
He must discover that Thoreau is no fanatic, no prescriber
for men. Thoreau is an individualist who believes in conduct-
ing his life as he chooses, though willing to talk about how he
lives and what he lives for. He warns us simply not to mistake
the means — trade, agriculture, manufacturing, profession —

vii

viii FOREWORD

for the ends of life itself. To the despair of the literal-minded,
he sometimes shows what appears to be a fantastic disregard
for ^‘facts’’ because of his intentness on what is right.

The reader must also beware of taking too seriously Tho-
reau^s lighter excursions into the realms of exaggeration —
often made just to tease or to gratify a whim. Remember, too,
though Thoreau^s theme may appear a pond or a stream,
Walden becomes the world, the little river the flow of life
itself. His seeming preoccupation with the men and women of
Concord, or Cape Cod, is fundamentally a manifestation of
deep concern with universal humanity.

Brooks Atkinson’s full-packed, generous volume furnishes
an opportunity thus to meet Thoreau. The whole of Walden
is included. There is as much more, besides, as could be
squeezed within the covers of a manageable, readable book.
The writings chosen fall roughly into two categories: the first
dealing with nature, the second with man. Yet though Walden^
The Week, Walking, and others, may seem to belong in the
first, with Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, A
Plea for Captain John Brown, along with several more, in the
second, one will discover they are all parts of the same equa-
tion, with the author as common denominator.

Here is the essential Thoreau. To house his thought, here
is his sensitive, vigorous writing, his unexpected humor —
Yankee to the core — his amazing scope of metaphor drawn
with equal felicity from the New England barnyard or the
ringing plains of Troy. Here, too, are Thoreau’s beautiful sen-
tences — sentences and whole paragraphs the perfection of
which has established him as a master of prose.

As a famous contemporary remarked — though referring to
Thoreau’s skill as a woodsman — it is well to submit to such a
guide, for the reward is great.

INTRODUCTION

By Brooks Atkinson
I

Thoreau was the genius of Concord, where he was bom
on July 12, 1817. Although that venerable and tr; nquil
town was sheltering two other eminent men of letlers —
Emerson and Hawthorne — and at least two minor li\erary
notables — ^Alcott and Channing — ^Thoreau was bone of Con-
cord’s bone and flesh of Concord’s flesh, and he could never
be torn away from the town where he was born. Several
other New England towns might have nourished him well;
he was a man of infinite resource and could find all truth
within himself. There are towns in the White Mountains
or on Cape Cod that would have provided a career for him;
if he had lived in them his healthy prose would have caught
their rhythm and his character would have taken shape in
their image, for he was the poet of New England locality.
But if Concord was fortunate in numbering him amongst
her subjects, he was fortunate in Concord where the
meadows were fertile, the hills gentle, the woods hospitable,
and where the natural resources were rich without being
wild. For there was a pond in Concord — Walden Pond —
which all the world recognizes now as a masterpiece, and
two pleasant rivers flowed through the bosom of the town,
filled with fluvial treasures and offering passage to other
parts of the universe.

Nor was that all Concord had to offer a man of original
mind and great personal character. lying close to Boston,

ix

X

INTRODUCTION

where the intellectual life of America was most resolute,
Concord was simmering with ideas. When Thoreau was a
young man Emerson was already the fountain-head of Con-
cord’s intellectual and spiritual life. Transcendentalism,
which believed in the infinity of man, flowed out of Emer-
son’s books, lectures, neighborhood relationships and walks
in the fields. Everything Emerson said and did was part and
parcel of his faith. But he was no solitary in Concord. Con-
cordians in general were alert. People discussed religion,
philosophy and politics in the parlors, church vestries, at
the stores and even along the streets. Already famous in
national history, Concord was making spiritual history by
the interest it cultivated in the vague, aspiring ideas of the
time. It was a fine place for a man whose curiosity about
life was unlimited.

Having chosen a good town for his nativity Thoreau also
chose good parents and relatives. His father was descended
from sea captains and merchants from the Channel island
of Jersey; his grandfather had accumulated moderate
wealth from privateering and storekeeping in Boston. His
mother had descended from a wealthy and notable Tory
family whose estates had been confiscated during the Revo-
lution. By the time of Thoreau’s generation the wealth on
both sides had dwindled to almost nothing; his immediate
family was always hard-pressed. But his parents were people
of independent mind, probity and vigor of spirit, and they
were capable of hard work. Although their means were
limited they sent Henry to Harvard College, Class of 1837,
for they believed in cultivating the mind. Being practical
people, they may have hoped to have him succeed in one
of the established professions, as other good students gen-
erally did. But the profession he practiced was a strange
one that he evoked from his private character, and it paid
him nothing but his self-respect. If his parents, his brother
and sisters were disappointed there is no record of regret

INTRODUCTION x\

or rebuke. They were people of intelligence and principle;
probably they always understood his potentialities and ad-
mired his vital integrity, and it is certain that they loved
him with the warm affection of a family that lived on in-
timate terms.

To some of his neighbors Thoreau seemed austere. But
his family had all the best of him, which was affectionate,
kind and loyal; and whenever Thoreau wrote to his mother
from Staten Island or to his sisters in Roxbury or Bangorj
the thoughts were homely, the style was glowing and the
concern with family affairs was anxious. When his father
died he dropped in large part the career he had carved out
of himself and Concord and took over the responsibilities of
the head of the family. Although that burden must have in-
volved a considerable sacrifice he accepted it calmly and
discharged his duty, for the Thoreaus were in the habit of
regarding, personal honor as a natural part of their lives.

He was a writer. He was the author of thirty-nine manu-
script volumes, only two of which were published during his
lifetime ; and it is doubtful if he ever earned much more from
his writings than they cost him. For the volumes of which
he was author were almost entirely the journals where he
industriously assembled his thoughts and observations and
tried to extract the basic truth of the cosmos. In fact, his
journals were the core of his life; h^ confessed to them and
then drew sustenance from them, ^‘as a bear sucks his claws
in winter;^’ and all his published works were made out of
them. ^‘Henry Thoreau — ^Writer of Journals^ ^ might well bo
the description of his profession. Walden and A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers are only parts of the
treasures buried in his copy-books.

When he graduated from college he might have had hopes
of a less private career. He was a serious young man. He
had already made up his mind chat most of the ways by
which men earn a living are degrading and that men sell

xii INTRODUCTION

themselves into perpetual bondage by conforming to the
traditional ways of the world. Most of his principles that
developed into passionate accusations in his mature philoso-
phy are to be found in his college essays, for the life of
Thoreau was a straight, firm line of moral development from
youthful introspection into the militant wisdom of his last
years. At first he tried to teach school, which was the or-
dinary profession of college graduates. In association with
his brother, who was an attractive, high-spirited young man
with considerable ability, Thoreau did teach school in Con-
cord for a year or two, much to the delight of the students
and their parents. Like everything with which he was con-
nected, it was no routine scheme for earning a living, but a
forward-looking school that gave full value in book educa-
tion and that tried to enrich the lives of the students by
personal association with the teachers during walks in the
fields and picnics on the river where some of the more
luxuriant facts about life could be learned. All his life
Thoreau had a winning way with children ; more than some
of their elders, they could appreciate the kindliness and
frankness of a naturally upright man. But his brother died,
a particularly agonizing death that left its mark on everyone
who loved him, and Thoreau gave up the school.

For a few years he had no settled employment. He lived
in Emerson’s home, taking charge of all those practical
things to which the grand old man of Concord was so con-
spicuously unsuited; he toiled over his thoughts, which was
his lifetime occupation, and wrote for The Dial, which was
the Pierian Spring of Transcendentalism. For a few months
he lived with William Emerson’s family on Staten Island,
New York, as a tutor, meanwhile apparently looking around
in New York for a literary association where he could find
a market for his wares. But the magazines and newspapers
in New York in 1843 were not ready to pay cash for the
kind of fiercely independent thoughts Thoreau struggled

INTRODUCTION

xiii'

with in his journals. Presently he was back in Concord, which
he regretted having left, and settled down with his family
in their pencil business. Probably he knew, what he had
long suspected, that the world was not ready to receive him
on his own exacting terms.

If Thoreau had never gone to live alone in a hut at
Walden Pond it is possible that he would never have been
celebrated. That was the most dramatic thing he ever did;
the chronicle of his adventure is a classic. In 1845
was ripe for a bold move. He was at loose ends; his brother's
death was still a source of misery. Furthermore, he was a
romantic youth, under the mask of truculent sobriety; he
was only 28 years of age, a lover of nature and an honest
and capable workman with his hands. As it happened, a
friend of his had lived one winter in a hut on the shore of
a pond in the next township and Thoreau very likely helped
him build the camp. As Thoreau^s bosom companion, Ellery
Channing, wrote in the spring of 1845: “It seems to me
you are the same old sixpence you used to be, rather rusty,
but a genuine piece. I see nothing for you in this earth but
that field which I once christened ^Briars’; go out upon
that, build yourself a hut and there begin the process of
devouring yourself alive.

By the end of March he borrowed an axe from Alcott,
cut down some white pine timber beside Walden Pond to
frame a hut, and on Independence Day, which was highly
propitious, he moved in and lived there alone for two years.
Watching and listening, studying, thinking, dreaming, at-
tending to the varying moods of the pond, writing in his
journals, trying the virtue of the great world outside by the
simple truths of his secluded existence — all that brought his
career to fruition. Although he left the hut in 1847 ^ind sup-
ported himself by sun^eying, pencil-making and other homely
crafts, he had found the path to a wise approach to life at
Walden Pond, and from that time on he was a man whoa

XIV

INTRODUCTION

destiny was in full view. Sometimes Thoreau seemed need-
lessly morose in his responses to human society; it was late
in life before he threw down his guards and took men as
good companions with human gusto. But the opening up of
his career began at Walden; after that camping experience
with its philosophical, economic and romantic aspects he
wrote with confidence, force and clarity; he understood and
rejoiced in his place in the world.

The rest of his career is quickly stated. In 1849
lished at his own expense A Week on the Concord and Mer-
rimack Rivers, which was the record, with glorious
discursions, of a boat voyage he had made with his brother
into New Hampshire ten years earlier. In 1854 he published
Walden, which slowly brought his original rebellion to ihe
notice of the world. Meanwhile, in various contemporary
periodicals he published On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,
which is an insurgent essay that has helped to reshape the
world; also his savory records of journeys to Canada, the
Maine Woods and Cape Cod, and many other minor essays.
All his life he and the other members of his family had been
ardent abolitionists, and at times took part in helping Negro
slaves to escape. In 1845 ke had personally seceded from the
Union as the most earnest protest he could make against a
government that tolerated slavery, and he spent a night iii
jail to make his point public. When John Brown defied the
government at Harper ^s Ferry, Thoreau, who was eminently
a practical man, found a concrete cause that illuminated all
he had ever thought and written about freedom; suddenly
he was transfigured into a man of action. His several speeches
on John Brown are grand summonses to battle — angry, re-
buking and founded on principle.

Soon after this inspiring episode in his career his health
began to fail rapidly. Although he made one desperate at-
tempt to recover it by a futile journey to Minnesota, he soon
realized that he was doomed, and he patiently spent the

INTRODUCTION

XV

last two frail years of his life getting his myriad papers in
order, compiling articles from his journals for the Atlantic
Monthly — sometimes riding out with his sister to look on
the beauties of Concord which he had devoted his life to
discovering and describing. His submissive death was the
surest proof that he wholly believed the faith he had lived.
He had no regrets or misgivings. “One world at a time.’'
he said to Channing, who was speculating on the hereafter.
When someone else inquired whether he had made his peace
with God, he answered, “We have never quarreled.” On
May 6, 1862, when he was almost 45 years of age and when
the fruit blossoms were out and the fragrance was coming
in at the window, he died, as he had lived, with complete
faith in the wisdom of nature. His sister remarked that he
was the most upright man she had ever known.

II

As a waiter Thoreau embraced so many subjects that
it is still difficult to catalogue him. He was “poet-naturalist,”
as Channing described him; but he was also philosopher,
historian, economist, rebel, revolutionary, reporter. Apart
from its poetic record of an idyllic adventure, Walden is the
practical philosophy of rebellion against the world’s cowardly
habits of living. Most formless of his books and yet most
winning and light-hearted, The Week is a compound of
thought, scholarship, speculation and narrative. The Maim
Woods is the most pungent and profound study of woods
and camping that has ever been written. On the Duty of
Civil Disobedience is an eloquent declaration of the prin-
ciples that make revolution inevitable in times of political
dishonor. The John Brown papers are political pamphleteer-
ing. Large portions of the journals are character studies of
the people in Concord whom Thoreau most admired. Al-
though he rarely left Concord and seldom read the news-

XVI

INTRODUCTION

papers he was well informed about the life of his times
md had fiery opinions about slavery and justice. His achieve-
ments in those fields have somewhat overshadowed the
range of his scholarship and the brilliance of his detached
portraits of people. Almost nothing escaped the keen eyes
and mind of this tireless writer; there is a bewildering vari-
ety in his work.

Although it is impossible to catalogue him neatly there Is
in everything he did a concrete point of view that gives a
clear-cut unity to the abundance and disarray of his writing.
Primarily he was a moral philosopher. From those first
tentative college essays, which are touching in their youth-
ful fortitude, to the fulminating John Brown polemics there
was a grave, responsible, pure-minded attitude toward life
in all his work. He had a passion for wise and honorable
living. As a whole, the Transcendentalists were not system-
atic philosophers, bent on arranging the pattern of life into
a logical sequence. Quite the contrary: they believed in liv-
ing by inspiration. Believing that man and the universe were
God, they worshipped Him by trying to live in spiritual har-
mony with the great laws of nature — trying humbly to be
good men. Their philosophy was little more than a collection
of ‘^thoughts,” of individual aspirations and manifestations
distilled from the sunshine and the mist over the river. They
believed that they were living the good life, not by accumu-
lating knowledge or acquiring possessions, but by quicken-
ing their awareness of the beauties of nature and human
nature. Thoreau yearned to be as pure and innocent as the
flowers in the field. Although the Transcendentalists were
not as a whole consistent churchgoers in a period when
churchgoing was an integral part of community life, they
were nevertheless deeply religious people. In a humble way,
they represented God on earth; they were His agents be-
cause they were trying to live in His image and they be-
Heved that men might yet found Heaven on earth by looking

INTRODUCTION

xvii

into their own hearts for the rules of life and by following
the direction of their finest instincts.

Thoreau was the most enduring of the lot because he had
the most intimate knowledge and understanding of nature
and was, accordingly, practical and concrete. That was the
source of what Emerson admired as ‘Hhe oaken strength”
in his writing. For Thoreau did not merely write verses to
the evanescent beauties of the out-of-doors and stroll placidly
through the fields after a stuffy day in the study; he made it
his business to know everything that he could about nature
from personal observation. He wanted to know the cold by
the tingle in his finger-tips and the darkness by stumbling
through the woods at night, and he felt most elated when
his senses were as alert as those of the woodchuck and the
loon. He felt that his whole life was on the most solid foot-
ing when his boots were deep in the riverbank muck in the
springtime. Although he acquired an enormous fund of knowl-
edge by the persistence of his goings forth in all kinds of
weather and by the extraordinary capacity he had for ob-
servation, he was not a modern scientist. On the contrary,
he suspected science because he believed that it dealt in
specimens rather than in life. No one has ever given him-
self to nature so passionately, so confidently, so privately.
It was a rich, turbulent, exhausting life he led. Although the
world was at loose ends and his neighbors lived lives of
^^quiet desperation,” he believed that he was on the right
track and had nothing but immortality to fear when he was
present to greet the first bluebird in late February or early
March and to find the first hepatica blooming among the late
snowdrifts. Spring always convinced him that he could live
forever on the lavish bounty of God. God was good: he knew
because he listened to the song of God in the woods.

Everything remarkable about Thoreau sprang directly from
his devotion to nature. It was nature more than man, it wai
the out-of-doors more than books or political discussions!

xviii

INTRODUCTION

that taught him the necessity for independence. A free man
himself — free by his own principle and vigilance — ^he de-
spised the cowards who conformed. He had a poor opinion
of his townsmen who mortgaged their lives for a farm and
pushed a house, barn and sixty-acre woodlot down through
the long years before them. He disliked the gentlemen who
had isolated themselves from life by civil employment or
social artifice. He w^as contemptuous of the million com-
promises men make with their governments to acquire wealth
or to preserve the peace on a false basis. As for himself, he
knew the fundamentals of life so thoroughly from personal
association with the flowers he ministered unto and the
woodlots he surveyed for his neighbors, that he had no in-
tention of making any compromises with his genius what-
soever, and he swore that he at least should be a free man
though everyone else sold his soul to comfort and con-
venience.

That is why he refused to pay a poll tax to a government
that tolerated slavery, and that is why John Brown was his
man. All his life he had been conducting an individual re-
bellion against the slavery of thought, commerce and man-
ners. When John Brown rebelled against Negro slavery at
Harper’s Ferry on principle alone at the certain risk of his
life, Thoreau completely understood him. It was his sort
of thing on a greater scale. It was what he had been wait-
ing for. Although some of his neighbors counselled caution
Thoreau took the initiative into his own hands, summoned
a village meeting and plead with his townsmen for justice
and action with more cogency and eloquence than he had
ever imported to a speech before. He carried the John Brown
defense to Boston at considerable personal risk. Although
the militant John Brown episode may seem alien to the life
of a solitary philosopher it was really the logical and bril-
liant climax to his philosophy. To love nature was to wor-
ship freedom. To believe in nature was to rebel.

INTRODUCTION

xix

Certainly it was no passport into good society. Especially
in his early years before his philosophy was fully formed
and when perhaps he felt a little wounded by the world’s in*^
difference to his talents, he had a truculent way with people
and it annoyed or grieved them according to their natures.
There was in those days a tactiturn or forbidding streak in
his deportment. One of his neighbors said she could love
him but that she could not like him. Emerson said: “Henry
is — with difhculty — sweet.” For the brazenly independent
life he had set his mind on living put him on the defensive
in a town accustomed to the amenities. Being sh}^ and ab-
normally sensitive, Thoreau protected himself by erecting
around him a high wall of reserve, skepticism and external
misanthropy. To those who had never glanced down into the
ringing depths of his character he was an odd stick, and
many people resented him.

That rasp in his social relations was a defect of personality
rather than the truth of his character. Fundamentally, he
was a man of abiding affections. Although he distrusted gen-
tleman and hated impostors he had such exalted standards
of friendship that his friends sometimes had difficulty in
meeting his requirements. Fo’' the simple, honest folks of the
town he had great relish and he liked to talk to them and
keep well posted on their affairs. He admired an honest
farmer more than a clever publican, and made no secret of
his preference. When he believed that he was among friends
he could be an exuberant comrade on occasions. With Chan-
ning, his familiar companion out-of-doors, he was on terms
of long-suffering and humorous affection; there was “an
inexhaustible fund of good fellowship” in Channing, to use
Thoreau’s own words of appreciation. Although his moral

XX

INTRODUCTION

ana people began to seek him out as a leader of thought, his
defenses began to drop one by one. He had made many
ifiends and did them the honor of taking them seriously.
The last eight years of his life were conspicuously social.
He visited and was visited. He enjoyed the companionship
of congenial people at home, in the woods and on journeys
to the White Mountains and the Maine Woods. When his
health began to fail there was a need for companionship
greater than he had experienced before; and when he
planned to go to Minnesota in search of his health he was
reluctant to go alone. For Thoreau was no misanthrope. He
required, as he said, ^^a broad margin to my life,’^ so that
his thoughts might grow freely. His perceptions were so
acute, his understanding of men was so penetrating that he
was unhappy in company that misjudged him. A person who
was spiritually coarse wounded him grievously. But he was
always civil, courteous and kind in his ordinary relationships
around town; he had abundant affection for his family and
his friends; he was generous with his talents; and in those
last ten years of his life, when his private battle with life was
won, he overflowed with good will toward good men. It may
have surprised him a little to discover how glorious life can
be in the company of good people. Certainly it expanded his
horizons enormously.

Since he was all of one piece — man, matter and spirit —
it is impossible to discuss his style of writing apart from
himself. At his best he wrote the most vigorous and pithy
prose in American literature; and no wonder, for his train-
ing was extraordinarily complete. On the one hand, he was
a remarkable classical scholar; all his life he read Greek
and Latin poetry and translated into English poetry the
classic verses he admired most. On the other hand, he had
learned out-of-doors the great truth of fresh simplicity.
There are no literary flourishes in his style; everything
grows out of nature. ‘‘Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,’^

INTRODUCTION

xxi

were the three great maxims of his life; and they stood
guard over the notes he scribbled in the field and the sen-
tences he developed out of them when he expanded them in
his journal, rewriting more than once until they carried his
thought with the greatest strength and directness of state-
ment he could master. ^‘The one great rule of composition —
and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this —
is to speak the truth,” he said. He approached his subject
as though he were the first man to write about this world
which has been so long inhabited and so carelessly spattered
with ink. Since his mind was clear, the facts are accurately
stated, and the thoughts and impressions endure in word?
that feel concrete — a part of old Mother Earth.

It is noticeable that his writing improved according to his
familiarity with a subject. When he first went into the Maine
Woods he was in new territory, which put him on his guard,
and his Ktaadn essay shows the reserve of a stranger whc
had not shed his Concord experience. After his third journey,
described in the Allegash essay, he wrote with the assurance
and enthusiasm of a man who had conquered his subject and
enjoyed the labor of recording it. W^hen he first went to
Cape Cod he felt uneasy and a little hostile to such meagre
land; after his third visit he was writing with the humorous,
genial relish of an old inhabitant. There is no better prose
in American literature than the clear, sinewy, fragrant writ-
ing in Walden which discusses the homely details of house-
building and kitchen economy and rejoices in the romantic
loveliness of sounds at night and bird notes by day and
speculates on the beauties of good living — all in plain images
and simple phrases that dp not change pace with the change
of subject. Although his writing looks easy, only a man of
keen mind and remarkable skill could have made a sentence
carry so much baggage and have given living form to im-
pulses of the imagination.

But that was Thoreau — a man with the skill of an artisan

xxii

INTRODUCTION

and the aspiration of a poet. He had disciplined himself so
that the two were perfectly mated. What he was as a man
looks sternly out of every page he wrote; it represents his
deliberate conviction. When Thoreau was dying, Bronson
Alcott described him in a familiar letter as ^The most
sagacious and wonderful Worthy of his time, and a marvel
to coming ones.’’ That was the generous thought of a neigh-
bor who was moved by the prospect of losing a noble friend.
But perhaps it was not unreasonably excessive. For by faith
and works Thoreau learned how to live a life, which is a
thing rarely heard of; and his writings have helped thou-
sands of his kinsmen to make their lives more rich and
honest and able.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Ne ^7 York and
Boston, 1906) , in 20 volumes, is the standard edition. Volumes
VII~XX contain the journals, a reprint of which, with a fore-
word by Henry S. Canby, has been issued in 1950. The Heart
of Thoreau^ s Journals , edited by Odell Shepard (New York
and Boston, 1927), offers a single volume of selections. Col-
lected Poems of Henry Thoreau y edited by Carl Bode (Chi-
cago, 1943), brings together “every available piece of genuine
verse” by Thoreau.

For full-length biography, see Thoreau, by Henry S. Canby
(Boston, 1939). Joseph Wood Krutch’s Thoreau (New York,
1948), is one of a new “American Men of Letters” series.
Readers may also wish to turn to earlier noteworthy bio-
graphical studies. One of the most revealing is Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s “Thoreau,” printed in the Atlantic Monthly (X,
239-249) in 1862, the year of Thoreau’s death. Thoreau’s
close friend, William Ellery Channing, is the author of Tho-
reaUy the Poet-Naturalist (Boston, 1873), revised and en-
larged by F. B. Sanborn (Boston, 1902). Henry Thoreau as
Remembered by a Young Friend, by Emerson’s son Edward
Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1917), should be included among
such primary sources.

For Thoreau as writer, see F. O. Matthiessen’s American
Renaissance (New York and London, 1941 ); for his times and
contemporaries, volume I of Literary History of the United
States, edited by Spiller, Thorp, Johnson, and Canby (New
York, 1948); for the immediate scene, Townsend Scudder’s

xxiii

xxiv BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Concord: American Town (Boston, 1947). Thoreau^s Wal-
den: A Photographic Register, by Henry Bugbee Kane (New
York, 1946) contains some eighty photographs of Walden
Pond and vicinity.

Norman Foerster’s Nature in American Literature (New
York, 1923), is valuable for an understanding of this im-
portant aspect of Thoreau, as is Passage to Walden, by
Reginald Lansing Cook (Boston, 1949). Other topics of spe-
cial interest may be found discussed in ^^Gandhi and Thoreau,’^
by Henry S. Salt, Nation and Athenaeum, XLVI (March 1,
1930), 728; The Orient in American Transcendentalism, by
Arthur E. Christy (New York, 1932); “An Evaluation of
Thoreau’s Poetry,'’ by Henry W. Wells, American Literature,
XVI (1944), 99-109; “Henry David Thoreau, Abolitionist,”
by N. A. Ford, New Erngland Quarterly, XIX (1946), 359-
371 ; and “Thoreau as Lecturer,” by Hubert H. Hoeltje, New
England Quarterly, XIX ( 1946), 485-494.

For bibliography, see volume III of Literary History of the
United States, particularly pages 742-746.

T. S,

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS

\T/io)reau lived at Walden Pond from July 4, 1845, to
'i^ytember 6, 1847. Walden was published in 1854.]

ECONOMY

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of
them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor,
in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden
Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by
the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two
months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of
my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by
my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would
call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all im-
pertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural
and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not
feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have
been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted
to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families,
how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask
those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to
pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions
in this book. In most books, the /, or first person, is omitted;
in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the
main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is,
after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not
talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom
I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme
by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side,
require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere ac-
count of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of
other men^s lives ; some such account as he would send to his
kindred from a distant land fer H he has lived sincerely, it

A

4 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages
are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the
rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to
them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on
the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the
Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages,
who are said to live in New England; something about your
condition, especially your outward condition or circum-
stances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is
necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be im-
proved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Con-
cord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the
inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a
thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins
sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the
sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over
flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders ‘‘until
it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural posi-
tion, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can
pass into the stomach;^’ or dwelling, chained for life, at the
foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpil-
lars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on
the tops of pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance
are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes
which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were
trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have
undertaken ; for they were only twelve, and had an end ; but
I could never see that these men slew or captured any
monster or finished any labor. They have no friend lolaus
to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra^s head, but as
soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to
have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools;
for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if
they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf,

WALDEN 5

that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they
were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil?
Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is con-
demned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin
digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have
got to live a man^s life, pushing all these things before them,
and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal
soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its
load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn
seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and
wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnec-
essary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to sub-
due and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the
man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming
fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it
says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust
will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s
life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not
before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by
throwing stones over their heads behind them: —

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, —

‘Trom thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and
care.

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throw-
ing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing
where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country,
through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with
the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that

8 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the common mode of living because they preferred it to any
other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But
alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear.
It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without
proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true
to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke
of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would
sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say
you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds foi
nld people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know
enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire
a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and
are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way
to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so
well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not
profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the
wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the
young, their own experience has been so partial, and their
lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons,
as they must believe ; and it may be that they have some faith
left which belies that experience, and they are only less young
than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet,
and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even
earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing,
and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is
life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it
does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any ex-
perience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this
my Mentors said nothing about.

One farmer says to me, ^^You cannot live on vegetable food
solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’’ and so
he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his sys-
tem with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he
talks behind bis oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones^

WALDEN 9

jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every ob-
stacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in Some
circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are
luxuries merely, and in others still aie entirely unknown.

The whole round of human life seems to some to have been
gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the
valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to
Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very
distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how
often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share be-
longs to that neighbor.” Hippocrates has even left direction!*
how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of
the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very
tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the vari-
ety and the joys of life arc as old as Adam. But man’s capac-
ities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what
he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. What-
ever have been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my
child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left un-
done?”

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for
instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines
at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered
this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the
light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what
wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the
various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same
one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as vari-
ous as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect
life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than
for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We
should live in all the ages of the world in an hour ; ay, in all
the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! — I know
of no reading of another’s experience so startling and inform-
ing as this would be.

10 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe
in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very
likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me
that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you
can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not with-
out honor of a kind, — I hear an irresistible voice which invites
me away from all that. One generation abandons the enter-
prises of another like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we
do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we
honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our
weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain
of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We a^e
made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do ; and
yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been
taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by
faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night
we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to un-
certainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to
live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of
change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many
ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change
is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking
place every instant. Confucius said, ^‘To know that we know
what we know, and that we do not know what we do not
know, that is true knowledge.^’ When one man has reduced a
fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I
foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that
basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and
anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is
necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be
some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though
in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what
are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been
taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books

WALDEN 11

of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly
bought at the stores, what the}^ stored, that is, what are the
grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but
little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as
our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from
those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all
that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the
first, or from long use has become, so important to human life
that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or
philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures
there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the
bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with
water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or
the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires
more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man
in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under
the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; foi
not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain
the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of
success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of
the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a
luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe
cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper
Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal
heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an
external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery
properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of
the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party,
who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from
too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were
observed, to his great surprise, 'To be streaming with per-
spiration at undergoing such a roasting.” So, we are told,
the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the
European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine

12 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the
:ivilized man? According to Liebig^ man’s body is a stove,
and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in
the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The
animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of
fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out.
Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire;
but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the
above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synony-
mous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food msiy
be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us, —
and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the
warmth of our bodies by addition from without, — Shelter
and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated
and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm,
to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take,
not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with
our beds, which are our nightclothes, robbing the nests ar d
breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the
mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow!
The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world;
and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a
great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes
possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his
Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of
the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food
generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and
Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the
present day, and in this country, as I find by my own expe-
rience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheel-
barrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all
be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the
other side of the globe, to batbarous and unhealthy regions,

WALDEN 13

and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in
order that they may live, — ^that is, keep comfortably warm,
— and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are
not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts
of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances
to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries ano
comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre-
life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Him
doo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none haf-
been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We
know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so
much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern
reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an im-
partial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage
ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life
of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or com-
merce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of
philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to
profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philos-
opher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found
a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its
dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and
trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theo-
retically, but practically. The success of great scholars and
thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not
manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, prac-
tically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitois
of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?
What makes families run out? What is the nature of the
luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is
in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life.
He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contem-

14 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
poraries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain
his vital heat by better methods than other men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have
described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth
of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more
splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more
numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he
has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there
is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and
that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler
toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the
seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now
send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man
rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise
in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the no-
bler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the
air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like
the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials,
are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and
often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would
not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant na-
tures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or
hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more
lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing them-
selves, not knowing how they live, — if, indeed, there are any
such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their en-
couragement and inspiration in precisely the present condi-
tion of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusi-
asm of lovers, — and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this
number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in
whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are
well employed or not; — ^but mainly to the mass of men who
are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of
their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
There are some who complain most energetically and incon-

WALDEN 15

solably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their
duty, I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but
most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated
dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus
have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my
life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my
readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history;
it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it.
I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have
cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have
been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my
stick too ; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past
and futurje, which is precisely the present moment; to toe
that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are
more secrets in my trade than in most men^s, and yet not
voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I
would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint
“No Admittance’^ on my gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove,
and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have
spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what
calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard
the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the
dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious
to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise .and the dawn merely, but,
if possible. Nature herself! How many mornings, summer
and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his
business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my
townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise,
farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers
going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materv*

16 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ally in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance
only to be present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the
town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and
carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and
lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of
it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend
upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earli-
est intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory
of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival ; or waiting
at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might
catch something, though I never caught much, and that,
manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very
wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print
the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with
writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this
case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-
storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; sur-
veyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all
across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged
and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testi-
fied to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give
a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences;
and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners
of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas
or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none
of my business, I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand
cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the
white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered
else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it with-
out boasting) , faithfully minding my business, till it became
more and more evident that my townsmen would not after

WALDEN 17

all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place
a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I
can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got
audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. How-
ever, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian v/ent to sell baskets at
the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood.
you wish to buy any baskets?’’ he asked. ^^No, we do not want
any,” was the reply. ‘What!” exclaimed the Indian as he
went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen
his industrious white neighbors so well off, — that the lawyer
had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth
and standing followed, — ^he had said to himself: I will go
into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can
do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would
have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to
buy thenr. He had not discovered that it was necessary for
him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at
least make him think that it was so, or to make something
else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had
woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not
made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less,
in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and
instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy
my baskets, I studied rather how to avoia the necessity of
selling them. The life which men praise and regard as success-
ful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind
at the expense of the others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me
any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any-
where else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more
exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better
known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait
to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I
had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was
not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact

18 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hin-
dered from accomplishing which for want of a little common
sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so
sad as foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits;
they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the
Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the
coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. You will
export such articles as the country affords, purely native
products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, al-
ways in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To
oversee all the details yourself in person ; to be at once pilot
and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and
keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write
or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of
imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast
almost at the same time, — often the richest freight will be
discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph,
unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing ves-
sels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of com-
modities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant
market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the mar-
kets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate
the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking advantage
of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages
and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied,
the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascer-
tained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be cor-
rected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often
splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier,
— there is the untold fate of La Perouse; — universal
science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great
discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants,
from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine,
account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how
you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man, — such

WALDEN 19

problems ot profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and
gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place
for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the.
ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good
policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation.
No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere
build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide,
with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St.
Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual
capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means,
that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking,
were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the
practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by
the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in
procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to
do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the
vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover
nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or
important work may be accomplished without adding to his
wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though
made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot
know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no
better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on.
Every day our garments become more assimilated to our-
selves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s cliaracter, until
we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical
appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No
man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch
in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and un-
patched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But evert
if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed m
improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such
tests as this, — Who could wear a patch, or two extra seamvj

20 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that
their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it.
It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken
leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident hap-
pens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a
similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there
is no help for it; .for he considers, not what is truly respect-
able, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great
many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last
shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute
the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a
hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm.
He was only a little more weather-beaten than when J saw
him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger
who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but
was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting ques-
tion how far men would retain their relative rank if they
were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell
surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to
the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her ad-
venturous travels round the world, from east to west, had
got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the
necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she
went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized
country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes.”
Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental
possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and
equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal
respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they
are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to
them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work
which you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is
never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not
need lo get a new suit to do it in ; for him the old will do,
that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.

WALDEN 21

Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his
valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — ^bare feet are older than
shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirees
and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as
often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and
trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they
will do; will the}^ not? Who ever saw his old clothes, — ^his old
coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements
so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some pool
boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorei
still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say,
beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and
not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a
new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you
have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All
men want, not something to do with, but something to do,
or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure
a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so
conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel
like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like
keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like
that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon
retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts
its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal
industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost
cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing
under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our
own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exoge-
nous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin
and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which
partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and
there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly
worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts
are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without
girdling and so destroying the man, I believe that all races

22 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is
desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his
hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects
so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town,
he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-
handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most
purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can
be obtained at prices really to suit customers ; while a thick
coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many
years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a
dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dol-
lar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a
better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so
poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will
not be found wise men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress
tells me gravely, ^^They do not make them so now,” not em-
phasizing the ^^They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as
impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made
what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean
what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular
sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasiz-
ing to myself each word separately that I may come at the
meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of con-
sanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they
may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally,
I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without
any more emphasis of the ‘They,” — “It is true, they did not
make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this
measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but
only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang
the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcse, but
Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority.
The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all
the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of
getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world

WALDEN 23

by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a
powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them,
so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and
then there would be some one in the company with a maggot
in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody
knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you
would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget
that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a
mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that
dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an
art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get.
Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on
Ihe beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time,
laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation laughs at
the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are
amused a:t beholding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen
Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen
of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or
grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the
sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and con-
secrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken
with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve
that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon-ball, rags
are as becoming as purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new
patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through
kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure
which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers
have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two
patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a
particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on
the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse
of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Com-
paratively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is

24 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing ia
skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode
by which men may get clothing. The condition of the opera-
tives is becoming every day more like that of the English;
and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or
observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be
^ell and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corpora'
tions may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what
they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately,
they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, ] will not deny that this is now a neces-
sary of life, though there are instances of men having done
without it for long periods in colder countries than this.
Samuel Laing says tliat “the Laplander in his skin dress, and
in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will
sleep night after night on the snow ... in a degree of cold
which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any
woollen clothing.” He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he
adds, “They are not hardier than other people.” But, prob-
ably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering
the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic com-
forts, which phrase may have originally signified the satis-
factions of the house more than of the family ; though these
must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates
where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or
the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except
for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer,
it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the
Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day’s march,
and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree
signified that so many times they had camped. Man was
not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek
to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him.
He was at first bare and out of doors ; but though this was
pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight.

WALDEN 25

the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid
sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had
not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house.
Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before
other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or
comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the
affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human
race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock
for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some ex-
tent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It
plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who
does not remember the interest with which, when young, he
looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was
the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive
ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have
advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of
linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and
shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is
to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more
senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great
distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more
of our days and nights without any obstruction between us
and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much
from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do
not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in
dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it
behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest
after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without
a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid
mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is
absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this
town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was
nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they
would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind.

26 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom
left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me
even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become
somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad,
six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up
their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man
who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and,
having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at
least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down
the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be
free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a
despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased,
and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord
or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed
to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box
who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I
am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of
being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A
comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived
mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of
such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands.
Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to
the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best
of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with
barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when
the sap is up, and made into great flakes, v/ith pressure of
weighty timber, when they are green. , . . The meaner sort
are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush,
and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as
the former. . . , Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet
long and thirty feet broad. ... I have often lodged in their
wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English
houses.’’ He adds that they were commonly carpeted and
lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were
furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so
far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended

WALDEN 27

over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a
lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two
at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and
every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as
the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but
I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, tnougH
the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes,
and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society
not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the
large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails,
the number of those who own a shelter is a very small frac-
tion of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside
garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter,
which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps
to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to
insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with own-
ing, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because
it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly
because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long
run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely
paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which
is a palace compared with the savage’s. An annual rent of
from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are the coun-
try rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvements
of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper,
Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper
pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other
things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these
things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage,
who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that
civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, — and
I think that it is, though only the wise improve their ad-
vantages, — it must be shown that it has produced better
dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of
a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required

28 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An
average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hun-
dred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to
fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered
with a family, — estimating the pecuniary value of every
man^s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more,
others receive less; — so that he must have spent more than
half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If
we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful
choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to exchange
his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advan-
tage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store
against the future, so far as the individual is concerned,
mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a
man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless this points
to an important distinction between the civilized man and
the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our
benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution,
in which the life of the individual is to a great extent ab-
sorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But
I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present
obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to
secure all the advantage without suffering any of the dis-
advantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have
always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes,
and the children's teeth are set on edge?

^^As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion
any more to use this proverb in Israel,

‘‘Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so
also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall
die.”

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord^
who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find that
for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or
forty years, that they may become the real owners of their

WALDEN 29

farms, ^hicK commonly they have inherited with encum-
brances, or else bought with hired money, — and we may re-
gard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses, — but
commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the
encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so
that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still
a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as
he says. On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn
that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own
their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of
these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mort
gaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with
labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him,
I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has
been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even
ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally
true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants,
however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of
their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely
failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconven-
ient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But
this puts an. infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests,
beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in
saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse
sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudia-
tion are the springboards from which much of our civilization
vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the
unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show
goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints o ' the
agricultural machine were suent.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a liveli-
hood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.
To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With
consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to
catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned
away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor;

30 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a
thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries.
As Chapman sings, —

‘The false society of men —

— for earthly greatness
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.’^

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be
the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has
got him. As I understand it, that was a valid objection
urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made,
that she “had not made it movable, by which means a bad
neighborhood might be avoided;^’ and it may still be urged,
for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often
imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neigh-
borhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one
or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a
generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the out-
skirts and move into the village, but have not been able to
accomplish it, and only death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or
hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civ-
ilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally
improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created
palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
And if the civilized marCs pursuits are no worthier than the
savage^s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in ob-
taining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he
have a better dwelling than the former?

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be
found that just in proportion as some have been placed in
outward circumstances above the savage, others have been
degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbal-
anced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the
palace, on the other are the almshouse and “silent poor.^’ The

WALDEN 31

myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the
Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not de-
cently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice
of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good
as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country
where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition
of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as
degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor,
not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need
to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border
our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I
see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all
winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any
visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old
and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of
shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all
their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to
look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish
this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or
less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every
denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of
the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked
as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast
the physical condition of the Irish with that of tlie North
American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other
savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civi-
lized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people’s rulers are
as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only
proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I
hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States
who produce the staple exports of this country, and are
themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine
myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house
is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives
because they think that they must have such a one as their

32 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which
the tailor might cut out for him^ or, gradually leaving off
palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard
times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is
possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious
than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not
afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of
these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept
and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a
certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas,
and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies?
Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or
the Indian’s? When I think of the benefactors of the race,
whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven,
bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any
retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture.
Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singular al-
lowance? — that our furniture should be more complex than
the Arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually
his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled
with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater
part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work
undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the
music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in
this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but
I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily,
when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I
threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could
I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air,
for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has
broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions
which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops
at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the
publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he re-

WALDEN 33

signed himself to their tender mercies he would soon be com-
pletely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are
Inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and con-
venience, and it threatens without attaining these to become
no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and
ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental
things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the
ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial
Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the
names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all
to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather
ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go
to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe
a malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the
primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left
him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed
with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He
dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either
threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the
mountain-tops. But lol men have become the tools of their
tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when
he was hungry is become a farmer ; and he who stood under
a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as
for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten
heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved
method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family
mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of
art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from
this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this
low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine
art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our
houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There
is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the
bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses

34 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal
economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does
not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gew-
gaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the
cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. }
cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life
is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of
the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly oc-
cupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest
genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that
of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared
twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support,
man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The
first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of
such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one
of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? An-
swer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your
bawbles and find them ornamental. The cart before the
horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before wc can adorn our
houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and
our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and
beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for
the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is
no house and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson, in his ^Wonder-Working Providence,’’ speak-
ing of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was
contemporary, tells us that ‘They burrow themselves in the
earth fo :* their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting
the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the
earth, at the Jiighest side.” They did not “provide them
houses,” says he, “till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing,
brought forth bread to feed them,” and the first year’s crop
was so light that “they were forced to cut their bread very
thin for a long season.” The secretary of the Province of
New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the informa-
tion of those who wished to take up land there, states more

WALDEN 35

particularly that ^Hhose in New Netherland, and especially
in New England, who have no means to build farmhouses at
first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground,
cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad
as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all
round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or
something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor
this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceil-
ing, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with
bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in
these houses with their entire families for two, three, and
four years, it being understood that partitions are run
through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the
family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in
the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling-
houses in this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to
waste time in building, and not to want food the next season;
secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people
whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the
course of three or four years, when the country became
adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome
houses, spending on them several thousands.”

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show
of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the
more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants
satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of
our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the
country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are
still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our
forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural
ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but
let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in
contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shell-fish, and
not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or
two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might pos-

36 THE Wr.ITINGS OF THOREAU
sibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, it
certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly
bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer.
Tn such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime
and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suit-
able caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or
even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understand-
ingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted
with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more
wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than
the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing.
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
But to make haste to my own experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, 1 borrowed an axe and went
down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I
intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall,
arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is
difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the
most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to
have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as
lie released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his
eye; but I returned it sWper than I received it. It was
a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods,
through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open
field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing
up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there
were some open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and sat-
urated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow
during the days that I worked there ; but for the most part
when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its
yellow sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I
heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to
commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring
days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing^
as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began

WALDEN 37

to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I
had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone,
and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to
swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water,
and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience,
as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour;
perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid
state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain
in their present low and primitive condition; but if they
should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing
them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more
ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty
mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb
and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st
of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part
of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose
groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like
the spirit of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber,
and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not hav-
ing many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to
myself, —

Men say they know many things;

But lo! the}^ have taken wings, —

The arts and sciences.

And a thousand appliances:

The wind that blows
Is all that anybody knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs
on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one
side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just;
as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick
was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had
borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods

38 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was
wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which
I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their
fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of
pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe
of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, hav-
ing become belter acquainted with it. Sometimes a ram-
bler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and
we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work,
but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and
ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of
James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg
Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was considered
an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not
at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved
from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of
small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much
else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around
as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest
part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the
sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for
the hens under the door-board. Mrs. C. came to the door
and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven
in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the
most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and
there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a
lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and
also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning
me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet
deep. In her own words, they were ^^good boards overhead,
good boards all around, and a good window,” — of two whole
squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way
lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an in-
fant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-

WALDEN 39

framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-milL nailed
to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded,
for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five
to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to
take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there
early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust
claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured
me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his
family on the road. One large bundle held their all, — bed,
coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat; she took
to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned after-
ward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead
cat at last.

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the
nails, and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads,
spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp
back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or
two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed
treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an
Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the
still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes
to ms pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the
time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring
thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work,
as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help
make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal
of the gods of Troy.

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south,
where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down
through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain
of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand
where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides
were left shelving, and not stoned ; but the sun having never
shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two
hours^ work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of

40 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ground; for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for
an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in
the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their
roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has dis-
appeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is
still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some
of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion
for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the
frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the
character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to
assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to
occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded
and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and
lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain, but be-
fore boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one
end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the
pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in
the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing
my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground,
early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some re-
spects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one.
When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few
boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf,
and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days,
when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but
the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder,
or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact
answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately
than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a
door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man,
and perchance never raising ‘any superstructure until we
found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities

WALDEN 41

even. There is some of the same fitness in a man^s building
his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest.
Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their
own hands, and provided food for themselves and families
simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be
universally developed, as birds universally sing when they
are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos,
which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built,
and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical
notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction
to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the
experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came
across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation
as building his house. We belong to the community. It is
not the tailor alone who is tlie ninth part of a man ; it is as
much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where
is this division of labor to end? and what object does it
finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but
it is not theiefore desirable that he should do so to the ex-
clusion of my thinking for myself.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and
I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making
architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity,
and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All
very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little
better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental re^
former in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the
foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within
the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have
an almond or caraway seed in it, — though I hold that al-
monds are most wholesome without the sugar, — and not
how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within
and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves.
What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were
something outward and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise
got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o’-pearl tints^,

42 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their
Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that
of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint
the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy
will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This
man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly
whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really
knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now
see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out
of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the
only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and
nobleness without ever a thought for the appearance and
whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be
produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of
life. l‘he most interesting dwellings in this country, as the
painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts
and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the in-
habitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in
their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque', and
equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when
his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination,
and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his
dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are
literally hoiiovv, and a September gale would strip them off,
like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor
wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the
ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our
Bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the archi-
tects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and
the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man,
forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under
him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would
signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them
and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the

WALDEN 43

tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the
architecture of the grave, — and “carpenter” is but another
name for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or
indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your
feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his
last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What
an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up
a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own com-
plexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to
improve the style of cottage architecture! When you have
got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides
of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with
imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the
log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet
wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and
a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one
door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact
cost of my house, pa3dng the usual price for such materials
as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done
by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because
very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and
fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials
which compose them: —

Boards

$8 03 }4, mostly shanty boards.

E.efuse shingles for roof

and sides

4 00

Laths

1 2S

Two second-hand windows

with glass ...

2 43

One thousand old brick .

4 00

Two casks of lime . . .

2 40 That was high.

Hair

0 31 More than I needed.

Mantle-tree iron . . .

0 IS

44 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

Nails

. . 3 90

EQnges and screws .

. . 0 14

Latch

. . 0 10

■Chalk

. . 0 01

Transportation . .

. . 1 40 1

I carried a good part
on my back.

In all. . . .

. . $28 uyi

These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones,
and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also
a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which
was left after building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the
main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as
it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my
present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter
can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than
the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast
more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity
rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and incon-
sistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwith-
standing much cant and hypocrisy, — chaff which I find it
difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as
sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and stretch myself
in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and phys-
ical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humil-
ity become the devil’s attorney. I will endeavor to speak a
good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere
rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than
my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation
had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and
under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience
of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in

WALDEN 45

the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true
wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be
needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been
acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education
would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences w^hicb
the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him
or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they
would with proper management on both sides. Those things
for which the most money is demanded are never the things
which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an
important item in the term bill, while for the far more valua-
ble education which he gets by associating with the most
cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The
mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a sub-
scription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly
the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, — a prin-
ciple which should never be followed but with circumspec-
tion, — ^to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of
speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives
actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are
to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these
oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it
would be better than this, for the students, or those who de-
sire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation them-
selves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and re-
tirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to
man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, de *
frauding himself of the experience which alone can make
leisure fruitful. ‘‘But,’’ says one, “you do not mean that the
students should go to work with their hands instead of their
heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something
which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that
they should not play life, or study it merely, while the com-
munity supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly
live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learu
to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

46 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathe-
matics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts
and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common
course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood
of some professor, where anything is professed and practised
but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope
or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study
chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics,
and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to
Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what
vagabond he is a satellite himself ; or to be devoured by the
monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating
the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have ad-
vanced the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had
made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and
smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or
the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at
the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers
penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to
cut his fingers? ... To my astonishment I was informed
on leaving college that I had studied navigation! — ^why, if
I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known
more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught
only political economy, while that economy of living which
is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely pro-
fessed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he
is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his
father in debt irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘^modern im-
provements;’’ there is an illusion about them; there is not
always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting com-
pound interest to the last for his early share and numerous
succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to
be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,
an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as

WALDEN 47

railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great
haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing im-
portant to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as
the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished
deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her
ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As
if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlar tic and bring the Old
World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first
news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American
ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping
cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile a minute
does not carry the most important messages; he is not an
evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild
honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn
to mill.

One says to me, 'T wonder that you do not lay up money;
3' ou love to travel ; you might take the cars and go to Fitch-
burg to-day and see the country.’’ But I am wiser than that.
I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.
I say to my friend. Suppose we try who will get there first.
The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is
almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty
cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now
on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at
that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile
have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime to-morrow,
or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a
job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be
working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the
railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep
r.head of you; and as for seeing the country and getting ex-
perience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance
altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever out"

48 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is
as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world
available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole
surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that
if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long
enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time,
and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and
the conductor shouts ‘‘All aboard when the smoke is
blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived
that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will
be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.’’ No doubt
they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that
is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost
their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spend-
ing of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to
enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part
of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to
make a fortune first, in order that he might return to Eng-
land and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up
garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting
up from all the shanties :n the land, “is not this railroad
which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, compara-
tively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish,
as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your
time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve
dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to
meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a
half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but
also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The
whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines
and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight
dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was
“good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” I

WALDEN 49

put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner,
but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate sc
much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out
several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with
fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,
easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater
luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the most
part unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the drift-
wood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my
fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,
though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the
first season were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72^4.
The seed corn was given me. This never costs anything to
speak of unless you plant more than enough. T got twelve
bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside
some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips
were too late to come to anything. My whole income from
the farm was

$23 44

Deducting the outgoes . . . . 14 72J4

There are left $8 71)4,

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this esti-
mate was made of the value of $4.50, — the amount on hand
much more than balancing a little grass which I did not
raise. All things considered, that is, considering the impor-
tance of a man^s soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the
short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even
because of its transient character, I believe that that was
doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the
land which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned
from the experience of both years, not being in the least
awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young

so THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
among the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only
the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and
not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious
and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few
rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that
than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from
time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his
necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd
hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to
an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to
speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in
the success or failure of the present economical and social
arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in
Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but
could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked
one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already,
if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I
should have been nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers
of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so
much the freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we con-
sider necessary work only, the oxen v/ill be seen to have
greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger. Man
does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks
of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that
lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers,
would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of ani-
mals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a
nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that
there should be. However, / should never have broken a
horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might
do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-
man merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so
doing, are we certain that what is one man’s gain is not
another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with
his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works

WALDEN 51

would not have been constructed without this aid, and let
man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it
follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more
worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not
merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work,
with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the
exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the
slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the
animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for
the animal without him. Though we have many substantial
houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still
measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the
house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen,
cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its
public buildings; but there are very few halls for free wor-
ship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their
architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract
thought, that nations should seek to commemorate them-
selves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than
all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury
of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at
the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any
emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except
to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone
hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any
hammering stone. Nations are possessed with an insane am-
bition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount
of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were
taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of
good sense would be more memorable than a monument as
high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The
grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is
a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man’s field than
a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the
true end of life. The religion and civilization which are bar-
baric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you

52 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation
hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.
As for the Pyramids^ there is nothing to wonder at in them
so much as the fact that so many men could be found de-
graded enough to spend their -lives constructing a tomb for
some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and
manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his
body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for
them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion
and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the
world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple
or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to.
The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and
bread and butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect,
designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and
ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Son:;, stonecutters.
When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind
begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monu-
ments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who under-
took to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he
said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I
think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the bole
which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments
of the West and the East, — to know who built them. For my
part, I should like to know who in those days did not build
them, — ^who were above such trifling. But to proceed with my
statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other
kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many
trades as fingers, I had earned $13.34. The expense of food
for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the
time when these estimates were made, though I lived there
more than two years, — not counting potatoes, a little green
‘.orn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the
value of what was on hand at the last date, — ^was

Rice . . . .

Molasses . . .
Rye meal . . .

Indian meal , .
Pork . . . .

Flour . . , .

Sugar . . . .

Lard . . . .

Apples . . . .
Dried apple . .

Sweet potatoes .
One pumpkin
One watermelon
Salt . . . .

$1
. 1

. 1

. 0
. 0

. 0

. 0 .

. 0

. 0

. 0

. 0

. 0

. 0

. 0

WALDEN S3

7iy2

73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
04H

99^ Cheaper than rye.

22

[” Costs more than Indian
88 meal, both money and
1 trouble,

80

65

25

22

10

6

2

3

>

-9

n

B.

fT

p-

Yes, I did cat $8.74, all told; but I should nut thus un-
blushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of
my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their
deeds would look no better in print. The next year I some-
times caught a mess of lish for my dinner, and once 1 went
so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my
bean-field, — effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would
say, — and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but
though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwith-
standing a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would
not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have
your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same
dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted
to

$8 40 ^

Qil and some household utensils • . . 2 00

54 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and
mending, which for the most part were done out of the house,
and their bills have not yet been received, — and these are
all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily
goes out in this part of the world, — ^were

House $28

Farm one year 14 72^

Food eight months 8 74

Clothing, etc., eight months .... 8 40^

Oil, etc., eight months 2 00

In all $61 99K

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a
living to get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$23 44

Earned by day-labor 13 34

In all $36 78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a
balance of $25.21^ on the one side, — this being very nearly
the means with which I started, and the measure of ex-
penses to be incurred, — and on the other, beside the leisure
and independence and health thus secured, a comfortable
house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore unin-
structive they may appear, as they have a certain com-
pleteness, have a certain value also. Nothing was given me of
which I have not rendered some account. It appears from
the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money
about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years
after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice,
a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink,

WALDEN 55

water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved
so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of
some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined
out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall
have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the
detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out,
being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in the
least affect a comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years’ experience that it would
cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food,
even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet
as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have
made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts,
simply off a dish of purslane {Portidaca oleracca) which I
gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the
Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And
pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful
times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of
green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the
little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of
appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a
pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries,
but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who
thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking
water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject
rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and
he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test
unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine
hoe-cakes, which I baked before my lire out of doors on a
shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building
my house ; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny
flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of
rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In
cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small

56 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as
carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a
real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses
a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in
as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a
study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,
consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the
primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind,
when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached
the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling grad-
ually down in my studies through that accidental souring of
the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process,
and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came
to ^^good, sweet, wholesome bread,’’ the staff of life. Leaven,
which some deem the soul of bread the spiritus which fills
its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the
vestal fire, — some precious bottleful, I suppose, first brought
over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its
influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian bil-
lows over the land, — this seed I regularly and faithfully pro-
cured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered
that even this was not indispensable, — for my discoveries
were not by the synthetic but analytic process, — and I have
gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly
assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast
might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay
of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingre-
dient, and after going without it for a year am still in the
land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness
of carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes
pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is
simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal
who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates
and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal-soda, or other
acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it

WALDEN 5?

according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius C’ato gave
about two centuries before Christ. ^Tanem depsticium sic
facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mor^
tarium indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre,
Ubi bene siibegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testii.’’ Which
I take to mean, ^'jNIake kneaded bread thus. Wash your
hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add
water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have
kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,^’ that is,
in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not
always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the empti-
ness of my purse, I saw none of it for more chan a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own
breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not
depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet
to far are we from simplicity and independence that, in
Concord,- fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops,
and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used
by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and
hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which
is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store.
I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and
Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land,
and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a
hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must
have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that
I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or
beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples
to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing
I could use various substitutes beside those which I have
named. ^^For,^’ as the Forefathers sang, —

^^we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.^^

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this

58 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I
did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less
water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled them-
selves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food
was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only
remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I
now wear were woven in a farmer’s family, — thank Heaven
there is so much virtue still in man ; for I think the fall from
the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that
from the man to the farmer; — and in a new country, fuel
is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted
still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price
for which the land 1 cultivated was sold — namely, eight
dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I
enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes
ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on
vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter
at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer
such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot under-
stand that, they cannot understand much that I have to
say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this
kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight
to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all
mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.
The human race is interested in these experiments, though
a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who
own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself, — and the rest
cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account, —
consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-
glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons,
a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl,

WALDEN 59

two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a
jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None
is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness.
There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village
garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture! Thank
God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture,
warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be
ashamed to see his furniture packed iii a cart and going up
country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men,
a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding’s
furniture. I could never tell from inspecting such a load
whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one;
the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more
you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks
as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if
one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, foi
what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our
exuvicE] at last to go from this world to another newly fur-
nished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all
these traps were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not
mo\^e over the rough country where our lines are cast without
dragging them, — dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that
left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg
off to be free. No wonder man has lost his elasticity. How
often he is at a dead set! ‘‘Sir, if I may be so bold, what do
you mean by a dead set?” If you are a seer, whenever you
meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that
he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furni-
ture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn,
and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what
headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead set who
has got through a knot-hole or gateway where his sledge
load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel com-
passion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seem-
ingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his “furniture,” as
whether it is insured or not, “But what shall I do with my

60 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
furniture?” My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider’s web
then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any^.
if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored
in somebody’s barn. I look upon England to-day as an old
gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage,
trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping,
which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little
trunk, bandbox, and* bundle. Throw away the first three at
least. It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays
to take up his bed and walk, ani^A I should certainly advise
a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an
immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all,
— ^looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of
the nape of his neck, — I have pitied him, not because that
was his all, but because he had all that to carry. If I have
got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one
and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be
wisest never to put one’s paw into it.

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for
curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and
moon, and I am willing that they should look in. The moon
will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun
injure my furniture or fade my carpet; and if he is some-
times too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to
retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided, than
to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady
once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within
the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it,
I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before
my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s
effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: —

^‘The evil that men do lives after them.”

As usual, a great proportion was irumpery which had be-

WALDEN 61

gun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a
dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his
garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned;
instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there
was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly
collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully trans-
ported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till
their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a
man dies he kicks the dust.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance,
be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the
semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the
idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would
it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or “feast
of first fruits,” as Bartram describes to have been the cus^
tom of the Mucclasse Indians? “When a town celebrates the
busk,” says he, “having previously provided themselves with
new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils
and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and
other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses,
squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all
the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast to-
gether into one common heap, and consume it with fire.
After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all
the fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast they
abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion
whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors
may return to their town.”

“On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry
wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from
whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the
new and pure flame.”

They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance
and sing for three days, “and the four following days they
receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighbor-

62 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

ing towns who have in like manner purified and prepared

themselves.”

The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the
end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time
for the world to come to an end.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the
dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that
they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do
thus, though they have no Biblical record of the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely
by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about
six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.
The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers,
1 had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-
keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or
rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to
dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly,
and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for
the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this
was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would
take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I
should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually
afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a
good business. When formerly I was looking about to see
what I could do for a living, some sad experience in con-
forming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to
tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking
huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits
might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but
little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from
my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquain-
tances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I
contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging

WALDEN 63

the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my
way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep
the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather
the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved
to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart
loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything
it handles; and though you trade in messages from Heaven,
the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued
my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, 1
did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other
fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian
or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is
no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how
to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit.
Some are ^industrious,’’ and appear to love labor for its own
sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief;
to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would
not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy,
I might advise to work twice as hard as they do, — work till
they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For my-
self I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the
most independent of any, especially as it required only thirt}"
or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day
ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to
devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor;
but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has
no respite from one end of the year to the other.

In short, I am convinced, both by faitli and experience,
that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship
but a pastime, if we will live simply avid wisely; as the
pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the
more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn
his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier
than I do.

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited

64 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did,
if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my
mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he
has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself,
I desire that there may be as many different persons in the
world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful
to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or
his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or
plant or sail, only let him not b^ hindered from doing that
which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical
point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave
keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance
for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a cal-
culable period, but we would preserve the true course.

Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer
still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally
more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover,
one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apart-
ments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary dwelling.
Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole
yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the
common wall; and when you have done this, the common
partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that
other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side
in repair. The only cooperation which is commonly possible
is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true
cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony
inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with
equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue
to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is
joined to. To cooperate in the highest as well as the lowest
sense, means to get our living together, I heard it proposed
lately that two young men should travel together over the
world, the one without money, earning his means as he went,
before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a
bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they

WALDEN 6S

could not long be companions or cooperate, since one would
not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting
crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the
man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels
with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may
be a long time before they get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my towns-
men say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in
philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a
sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure
also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade
me to undertake the support of some poor family in the
i:cwn; and if I had nothing to do — for the devil finds em-
ployment for the idle^ — I might try my hand at some such
pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge
myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obliga-
tion by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as
comfortably as 1 maintain myself, and have even ventured
so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all un-
hesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen
and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of
their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to
other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for
charity as well as for anything else. As for Doing-good, that
is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have
tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that
it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should
not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular call .
ing to do the good which society demands of me, to saw
the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like
but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that
now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man
and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I
decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say,

66 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Persevere, even if the whole world call it doing evil, as it is
most likely they will.

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one;
no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence.
At doing something, — I will not engage that my neighbors
shall pronounce it good, — 1 do not hesitate to say that I
should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is for
my employer to fmd out. What good I do, in the common
sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and
for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically.
Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming
mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness afore-
thought go about doing good. If 1 were to preach at all in
this strain, I should say rather. Set about being good. As
if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to
the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and
go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cot-
tage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and
making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his
genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that
no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the
meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing
it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the
world going about him getting good. When Phaeton, wish-
ing to prove his heavenly birth bv his beneficence, had the
sun’s chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track,
he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of
Heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up
every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at
length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thun-
derbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine
for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from good-
ness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for
a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the
conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my

WALDEN 67

life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African
deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose
and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear
that I should get some of his good done to me, — some of
its virus mingled with my blood. No, — ^in this case I would
rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man
to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warn,
me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if '
should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland do^
that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s
fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard was no doubt ar
exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his
reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred
Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never
heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely
proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being
burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their
tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it some-
times chanced that they were superior to any consolation
which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as
you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears
of those who, for their part, did not care how they were
done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and
came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need,
though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If
you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely
abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes.
Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty
and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not mereh
his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy
more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish la-
borers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged
clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat

68 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one
who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm
him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two
pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they
were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could
afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he
had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he
needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it
would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt
than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hack-
ing at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,
and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of
time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode
of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to
relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds
of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest.
Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them
in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they em-
ployed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth
part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend
the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only
a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the gen-
erosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the
remissness of the officers of justice?

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it
is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one
sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to
me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor ; meaning
himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more
esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I
once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of learn-
ing and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary,
and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Mil-
ton, Newton, and otl^rs, speak next of her Christian heroes,
whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a

WALDEN 69

place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great.
They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must
feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not Eng-
land’s best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philan-
thropists.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by theii
lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value
chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it
were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness
withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use,
and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit
of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to
me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness
must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant super-
fluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is uncon-
scious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The
philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remem-
brance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls
it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our
despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take
care that this does not spread by contagion. From what
southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what
latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light?
Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would
redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform
his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — for
that is the seat of sympathy, — ^he forthwith sets about re-
forming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers
— and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it —
that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in
fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is
danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble
before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy
seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and embraces
the populous Indian and Chine^’e villages; and thus, by a

70 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the mean-
while using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures him-
self of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one
or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and
life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome
to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have
committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man
than myself.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his
sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the
holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let
the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and
he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My
excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I
never chewed it, that is a penalty w^hich reformed tobacco-
chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have
chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be
betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your
left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth
knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take
your time, and set about some free labor.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with
the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious curs-
ing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that
even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the
fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift
of life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success
does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear ;
all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me
evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with
-t. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian,
botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple
and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang
over our owu brows, and take up a little life into our pores.

WALDEN 71

Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to
become one of the worthies of the world.

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of
Shiraz, that “they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many
celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty
and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the
C3^ress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this?
He replied: Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed
season, during the continuance of which it is fresli and bloom-
ing, and during their absence dry and withered ; to neither of
which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing;
and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. —
Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah.
or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the
race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be libera^
as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
azad, or free man, like the cypress.^^

THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

COMPLEMENTAL VERSES

THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY

Thou dost presume loo much, poor needy wretch,
I'o claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,

Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,

With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand.
Tearing those humane passions from the mind.
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,

And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.

We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,

Or that unnatural stupidity

That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc’d

Falsely exalted passive fortitude

Above the active. This low abject brood,

That fix their seats in mediocrity.

Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess.

Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,

But patterns only, such as Hercules,

Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath’d cell;

And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.

T. Caren

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT i
LIVED FOR

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider
every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed
the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I
live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession,
for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked
over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed
on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any
price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a highei
price on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — took his
word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk, — cultivated it,
and him too to some e.xtent, I trust, and withdrew when I
had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This
experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate
broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and
the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a
house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I dis-
covered many a site for a house not likely to be soon im-
proved, which some might have thought too far from the
village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
there I might live, I said ; and there I did live, for an hour,
a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run
off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in.
The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may
place their houses, may be sure that they have been antic-
ipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard,
wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines
should be left to stand before the door, and whence each
blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage: and then

73

74 THE WRITINGS OF TH0RE4U
I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion
to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the
refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, —
but I never got my fingers bui:ned by actual possession. The
nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought
the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and
collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to
carry it on or off with ; but before the owner gave me a deed
of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her
mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars
to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents
in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was
that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars,
or all together. However, I let him k^ep the ten dollars and
the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to
be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it,
and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten
dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials
for a wheelbarrow left. 1 found thus that I had been a rich
man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the
landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it
yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, —

‘T am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute.”

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the
most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer sup-
posed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the
owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put
his farm in rime, the most admirable kind of invisible fence,
has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were:
its complete retirement, being about two miles from the

WALDEN 75

village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated
from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river,
which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in
the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color
and ruinous state of the house and barn, and thu dilapidated
fences, which put such an interval between me and the last
occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed
by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have;
but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest
voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind
a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the
house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor
finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollov/
apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had
sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more
of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready
to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,
— I never heard what compensation he received for that, —
and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse
but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my posses-
sion of it; for 1 knew all the while that it would yield the
most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only
afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a
large scale — I have always cultivated a garden — was, that
I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve
with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates between
the good and the bad ; and when at last I shall plant, I shall
be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my
fellows, once fo’* all, As long as possible live free and uncom-
mitted. It makes but little difference whether you are com-
mitted to a farm or the county jail.

Old Cato, whose ^‘De Re Rustica’^ is my “Cultivator,’’
says, — and the only translation I have seen makes sheer non-
sense of the passage, — “When you think of getting a farm
turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your

76 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go lound
it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you,
\i it is good.’^ I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round
and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that
it may please me the more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which
I purpose to describe more at length, for convenience putting
the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do
not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily
as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only
(0 wake my neighbors up.

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began
to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident,
was on Independence Day, or the Fourth ot July, 1845, my
house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence
against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls
being of rough, weather ‘Stained boards, with wide chinks,
which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs
and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean
and airy lock, especially in the morning, when its timbers
were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some
sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it
retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral
chaiacter, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain
I5:>m‘ch I had visisted a year before. This was an airy and un-
plastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where
a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed
o\^er my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of
mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only,
of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the
poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears
that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every-
where.

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except

WALDEN 77

a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making
excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my
garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has
gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial
shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling
in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of
crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was
suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need
to go outdoors to take the aii, for the atmosphere within had
lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within-doors as
behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The
Harivansa says, “An abode without birds is like a meat with-
out seasoning.’’ Such was not my abode, for I found myself
suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned
one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only
nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden
and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling
songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a
villager, — the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the
field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile
and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat
higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between
that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that
our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but
I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a
mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most
distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out
on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side
of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other
lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly
clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft
ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while
the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every
direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some
nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon

78 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of

mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the
intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air
and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-
afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood
thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A
lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the
clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened
t)y clouds, the watei, full of light and reflections, becomes a
lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill-
top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there
was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a
A^idc indentation in the hills which form the shore there,
where their opposite sides sloping toward each other sug
gested a stream flowing out in that direction through a
wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked
between and over the near green hills to some distant and
higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by
standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of che
peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in
the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint,
and also of some portion of the village. But in other direc-
tions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond
the woods which surrounded me. It is v/cll to have some
water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float
the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when
you look into it you see that earth is not continent but in-
sular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When
I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury
meadows, which in time of flood I distingu'shed elevated
perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in
a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin
crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of inter-
vening water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt
Was but dry landn

WALDEN 79

Though the view from my door was still more contracted,
I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was
pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub oak
plateau to which the opposite shore arose stretched away
toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary,
affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
^‘There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy
freely a vast horizon/’ — said Damodara, when his herds re-
quired new and larger pastures.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearei to
those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which
had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many
a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are \vont to
imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more
celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of
Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I dis-
covered that my house actually had its site in such a with-
drawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.
If it were worth the wiiile to settle in those parts near to the
rieiatlcs or the Hyades, to Aldcbaran or Altair, then I was
really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I
had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray
to niy nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless
nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had
squatted; —

‘There w^as a shepherd that did live.

And held his thoughts as high
As Avere the mounts wdiereon his docks
Did hourly feed him by.”

What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks al-
ways wandered to higher pastures than liis thoughts?

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life
of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature
herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the

80 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond ; that was a
religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.
They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub
of King Tching-thang to this effect: Renew thyself com-
pletely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.”
I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.
I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making
its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment
at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows
open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
It was Homer’s requiem ; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the
air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was some-
thing cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till for-
bidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.
The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day,
is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us;
and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which
slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be
expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we
are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical
nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own
newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accom^
panied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of
factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life
than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its
fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That
man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier,
more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has
despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening
way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of
man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and
his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All mem-
orable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in
a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, ‘^All intelligences
awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and
most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an

WALDEN 81

hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of
Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose
elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the
day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks
say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I
am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the
effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an
account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They
are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome
with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The
millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one
in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exer-
tion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who
was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of
the dawn, w^hich does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It
is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or ta
carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but
it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere
and medium through which we look, which morally we can
do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of
arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details,
worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical
hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry informa-
tion as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how
this might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was
not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resigna-
tion, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and

32 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAIJ
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean,
why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to
know it by experience, and be able to give a true account
of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me,
are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the
devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that
it is the chief end of man here to '‘glorify God and enjoy him
forever.”

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us
that we were long ago changed into men; like p37gmies we
fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout,
and our best virtue has for its occasion a super lluous and
evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.
An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and
lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep
your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this
chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms
and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed
for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go
to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning,
and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Sim-
plify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary
eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Con-
federacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever
fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it
is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its
so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all
external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and over*

WALDEN 83

grown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up
by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by
want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million house-
holds in the land ; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a
rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of
life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that
it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice,
and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we
should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we
do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and
nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to im-
prove them^ who will build railroads? And if railroads are
not built, how shall wa get to Heaven in season? But if we
stay at home and mind our business, who will want rail-
roads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the
railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man.
The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand,
and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleep-
ers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down
and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding
on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And
when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him
up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry
about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that
it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers
down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that
they may sometime get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We
are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say
that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand
stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we
haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus*
dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should

84 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire,
that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his
farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press
of engagements which was his excuse so many times this
morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but
would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save
property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth,
much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it
known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have
a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it
were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half-
hour^s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
head and asks, ^^WhaCs the news?^^ as if the rest of mankind
had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked
every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to
pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s
sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. ^Tray tell
me anything new that lias happened to a man anywhere on
this globe, — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that
a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the
Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in
the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has
but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I
think that there are very few important communications
made through it. To speak critically, I never received more
than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years
ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, com-
monly, an institution through which you seriously offer a
man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely
offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any mem-
orable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed,
or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or
one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow
run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or
lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — ^we never need read

WALDEN 85

of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the
principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and ap*
plications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip
and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea*
Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such
a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn
the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares
of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken bj
the pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit
might write a twelvemonth, or twelve years, beforehand with
sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know
how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedrc
and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
proportions, — they may have changed the names a little
since I saw the papers, — and serve up a bull-fight when other
entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us
as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain
as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head iI^
the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last signifi-
cant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution oi
1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for
an average year, you never need attend to that thing again,
unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character.
If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, noth-
ing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolu
tion not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that
is which was never old! ‘‘Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of
the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his
news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near
him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your
master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My
master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he
cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone,
the philosopher remarked : What a worthy messenger 1 What
a worthy messenger!” The preacher, instead of vexing the

86 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the
week, — for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week,
and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with
this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with
thundering voice, ^Tause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but
deadly slow?’’

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths,
while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe real-
ities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to
compare it with such things as we know, would be like a
fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we
respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music
and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are
unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy
things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty
fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes
and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men
establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit
everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory founda-
tions. Children, who play life, discern its true law and rela-
tions more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but
who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by
failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that “there was a
king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native
city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity
in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous
race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having
discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the mis-
conception of his character was removed, and he knew him-
self to be a prince. So soul,” continues the Hindoo philos-
opher, “from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes
its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be BrahmeT I per-
ceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean

WALDEN 87

life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the
surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.
If a man should walk through this town and see only the
reality, where, think you, would the “Mill-dam” go to? If he
should give us an account of the realities he beheld there,
we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at
a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a
dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a
true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account
of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the
system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the
last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and
sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are
now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment,
and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and
noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the
reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and
obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel
fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives
in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so
fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least
could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not
be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's
wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or
break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company
come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children
cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock
under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and
overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a
dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this
danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill.
With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking
another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine

88 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell
rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of
music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and
wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of
opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and ap-
pearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris
and London, through New York <ind Boston and Concord,
through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy
and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in
place, which we can call reality ^ and say. This is, and no
mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below
freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a
wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge,
not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might
know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had
gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and
face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both
its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge
dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will
happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we
crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the
rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we
are alive, let us go about our business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but
while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow
it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I
would drink deeper ; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly
with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of
the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as
wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it
discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not
wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.
My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties con-
centrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an
organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and

WALDEN 89

fore pawS; and with it I would mine and burrow my way
through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere
hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I
judge; and here I will begin to mine.

READING

Wi’fH a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits^
all men would perhaps become essentially students and ob-
servers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting
to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our
posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame
even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are im-
mortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest
Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil
from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe
remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,
since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in
me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that
robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.
That time which we really improve, or which is improvable,
is neither past, present, nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but
to serious reading, than a university; and though I was
beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had
more than ever come within the influence of those books
which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first
written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to
time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin
Mast, “Being seated, to run through the region of the spirit-
ual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be in-
toxicated l3y a single glass of wine; I have experienced this
pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric
doctrines.’’ I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the
summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.
Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house

90

WALDEN 91

to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more
study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of
such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of
travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment
made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was ther
that 1 lived.

The student may read Homer or ^Eschylus in the Greek
without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies
that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate
morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if
printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always
be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjec-
turing a larger sense than common use permits out oi what
wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap
and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to
bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem
as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare
and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days
and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient
language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in
vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin
words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the
study of the classics would at length make way for more
modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student
will always study classics, in whatever language they may
be written and however ancient they may be. For what are
the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They
are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are
such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi
and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study
Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true
books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will
task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of
the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes

92 THE WRITINGS'OF THOREAU
underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to
this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly
as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to
speak the language of that nation by which they are written,
for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and
the written language, the language heard and the language
read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a
dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously,
like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and
experience of that ; if that is our mother tongue, this is our
father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too signifi-
cant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in
order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the
Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled
by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written
in those languages ; for these were not written in that Greek
or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
literat/ire. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece
and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written
were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap
contemporary literature. But when the several nations of
Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages
of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising litera-
tures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled
to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity.
What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear,
after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars
only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator^s occasional
bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly
as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the
firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the
stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers
forever comment on and observe them. They are not ex-
halations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath.
What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found

WALDEN 93

to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspira-
tion of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before
him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more
equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by
the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to
the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can
understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on
his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the
choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with
us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the
work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into
every language, and not only be read but actually breathed
from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in
marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
The symbol of an ancient man^s thought becomes a modern
man’s speech. Tv»^o thousand summers have imparted to the
monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a
maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried
their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to
protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the
treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of
generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand
naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They
have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten
and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them.
Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in
every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an
influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scorn-
ful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted
leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of
wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still
higher but yet inaccessible circles of* intellect and genius, and
is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the
vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves
his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his

94 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly
feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics
in the language in which they were written must have a very
imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race ; for it
is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made
into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may
be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor iFschylus, nor Virgil even, — works as
refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morn-
ing itself ; for later writers, say what we will of their genius,
have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish
and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients.
They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It
will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning
and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreci-
ate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which
we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic
but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still
further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with
Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes
and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have
successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the
world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read
by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have
only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most
astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to
read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to
cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade;
but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little
or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that
which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to
sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toc to
read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

1 think that having learned our letters we should read the

WALDEN 95

best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our
a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth
classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives.
Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and per-
chance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate
their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work
in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled ‘'Little
Reading,” which I thought referred to a town of that name
which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants
and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the
fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer noth-
ing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this
provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the
nine thousandth tale about Zcbulon and Sophronia, and how
they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did
the course of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how
it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how
some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having
needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the
bell for all the w^orld to come together and hear, O dear! how
he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had
better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal
novcldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till
they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest
men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the
bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “The
Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by
the celebrated author of ‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in
monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” All
this they read wdth saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curi-
osity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even
yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old
bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella, — -

96 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronuncia-
tion, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, stagna-
tion of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and
sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of
gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure
wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a
surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called
good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to?
There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste
for the best or for very good books even in English literature,
whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred
and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have
really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and
as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics
and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them,
there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become ac-
quainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age,
who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he
is above that, but to ‘‘keep himself in practice,’^ he being
a Canadian by birth ; and when I ask him what he considers
the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this,
to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much
as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they
take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come
from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find
how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose
he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original,
whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate ; he
will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence
about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges,
who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has
proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry
of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
alert and heroic reader ; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or

WALDEN 97

Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their
titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the
Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go
considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but
here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity
have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding
age have assured us of; — ^and yet we learn to read only as
far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when
we leave school, the “Little Reading,’’ and story-books, which
are for boys and beginners; and oui reading, our conversa-
tion and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only
of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this out
Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known
here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his
book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him, —
my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended
to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His
Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on
the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred
and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do
not make any very broad distinction between the illiterate-
ness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiter-
ateness of him who has learned to read only what is for
children and feeble intellects. Wc should be as good as the
worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good
they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little
higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the
daily paper.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There
are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which,
if we could really hear and understand, would be more salu-
tary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly
put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many
a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of
a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will

98 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
plain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present un-
utterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same
questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in
their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been
omitted; and each has answered them, according to his
ability, oy his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom
we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm
in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and
peculiar i cligious experience, and is driven as he believes
into siler<t gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think
it is not t/ue; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled
the same road and had the same experience; but he, being
wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors ac-
cordingly, and is even said to have invented and established
worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoro-
aster then^ and through the liberalizing influence of all the
worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let “our church”
go by the board.

We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and
are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But con-
sider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not
wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them,
for that will not advance either of us. We need to be pro-
voked, — ^^oaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have
a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools
for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in
the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library
suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend
more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than
on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon
schools, that we did not leave off our education when we
begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were
universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of uni-
versities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to
pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world
be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot

WALDEN 99

students be boarded here and get a liberal education under
the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lec-
ture to us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending
the store, we are kept from school too long, and our educa-
tion is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in
some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe, It
should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It
wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spent
money enough on such things as farmers and traders value^
but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things
which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This
town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house,
thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so
much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a
hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars an-
nually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent
than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in
the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the ad-
vantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should
our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read news-
papers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best
newspaper in the world at once? — not be sucking the pap
of ^‘neutral family^’ papers, or browsing ‘‘Olive-Branches”
here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned so«
cieties come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why
should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co.
to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste
surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, —
genius — learning — wit — books — ^j:)aintings — statuary — music
— ^philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village
do, — not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a
parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim
forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock
with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit
of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our
circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater

100 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men
in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the
while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon
school ve want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble vil-
lages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the
river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over
the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

SOUNDS

But while we are confined to books, though the most select
and classic, and read only particular written languages,
which ai*e themselves but dialects and provincial, we are
in danger of forgetting the language which all things and
events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and
standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays
which stream through the shutter will be no longer
remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method
nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever
on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or
poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or
the most admirable routine of life, compared with the
discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will
you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your
fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay,
I often did better than this. There were times when I could
not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to
any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad
margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having
taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from
sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness,
while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through
the house, until by the sun falling in at my west win-
dow, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the
distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew
in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far
better than any work of the hands would have been. They

lOJ

102 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over
and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the
most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day ad-
vanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and
lo, now it is evening, and nothing menwrable is accomplished.
Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my in-
cessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on
the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or sup-
pressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days
were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen
deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the
ticking of a clock; for 1 Jived like the Puri Indians, of whom
it is said that ^‘for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they
have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning
by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow,
and overhead for the passing day.’^ This was sheer idleness
to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and
flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have
been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in him-
self, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will
hardly reprove his indolence.

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over
those w^ho were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to
society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my
amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama
of many scenes and without an end. If we were always, in-
deed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according
to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never
be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough,
and U will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was
dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors
on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget,
dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from
the pond on it^ and then with a broom scrubbed it clean

WALDEN 103

and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their
fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost
uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household
effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy’s
pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not re-
move the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and
hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as
if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to
stretch an awning over them and lake my seat there. It was
worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and
hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting
most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A
bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under
the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones,
chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It
looked as if this was the way these forms came to be trans-
ferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads, —
because they once stood in their midst.

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the
edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of
pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the
pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my
front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-
everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand
cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the
sand cherry {Cerasiis pumila) adorned the sides of the path
with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically
about its short stems, which last, in the fall, v^eighed down
with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths
like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to
Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach
{Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up
through the embankment which I had made, and growing
five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical
leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds,

104 TH£ WRITINGS OF THOREAU
suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which
had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic
into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter;
and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they
grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender
bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there
was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight.
In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower,
had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright
velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down
and broke the tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are
circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, fly-
ing by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless
on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to
the air; a flsh hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond
and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before
my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is
bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and
thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle
of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the
beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy
who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the
town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite
down at the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a
dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off;
why, you couldn’t even hear the whistle 1 I doubt if there is
such a place in Massachusetts now: —

‘In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o’er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord.^'

WALDEN lOS

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hun-
dred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village
along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by
this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the
whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquain-
tance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me
for an employee; and so I am. 1 too would fain be a
track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods sum-
mer and winter, sounding like the stream of a hawk sailing
over some farmer^s yard, informing me that many restless
city merchants are arriving wdthin the circle of the town, or
adventurous country traders from the other side. As they
come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off
the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of
two towns. Here come your groceries, country ; your rations,
countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his
farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for
them! screams the countryman^s whistle; timber like long
battering-rams goiiig twenty miles an hour against the city^s
walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-
laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering
civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian
huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are
raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the
woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up
come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off
with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the
beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direc-
tion it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not
look like a returning curve, — ^with its steam cloud like a
banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens,
unfolding its masses to the light, — as if this travelling demb
god, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset

106 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse
make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the
earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will
put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the
earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were
as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for
noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were
the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and
Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their
errands and be their escort.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same
feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more
regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and
rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are
going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my
distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the
petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of
the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this
winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains,
to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened
thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. It
the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow
lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant
plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard,
in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all
the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for
seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping
only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his
tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote
glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and
snow; and he wrill reach his stall only with the morning star,
to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or
perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the
superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves

WALDEN 107

and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber.
If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is pro-
tracted and unwearied!

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns,
where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest
night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of
their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant
station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gath-
ered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and
fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs
in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and
precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the
farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted
institution regulates a whole country. Have not men im-
proved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was in-
vented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than
they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying
in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been astonished
at the miracles it has wTought; that some of my neighbors,
wdio, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get
10 Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when
the bell rings. To do things ^Tailroad fashion’^ is now the
byword ; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and
so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no
stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the
mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an AtropoSj
that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.)
Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these
bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
yet it interferes with no man’s business, and the children
to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We
are all educated thus to be sons of Tell The air is full of
invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate
Keep on your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is* i^s enterprise ana
bravery. It does not clasp its hands and ur^y to Jupite X

208 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
see these men every day go about their business with more
or less courage and content, doing more even than they sus-
pect, and perchance better employed than they could have
consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who
stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista,
than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who in-
habit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have
not merely the three-o’-clock-in-the-morning courage, which
Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does
not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storiTi
sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this
morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging
and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their
engine bell from out of the fog bank of their chilled breath,
which announces that the cars are coming^ without long de-
lay, notwithstanding the veto of a New h^ngland northeast
snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow
and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which
is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field
mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an
outside place in the universe.

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert,
adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and
sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I
am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles
past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their
odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, re-
minding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian
oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I
feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the
palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England
heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut
husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails.
This carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now
than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books.

WALDEN 109

Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they
have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-
sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from th<
Maine woodS; which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,
risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did gc
out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third,,
and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave
over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston
lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before
it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities,
the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, ih{
final result of dress, — of patterns which are now no longei
cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles
English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc.
gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty
going to become paper of one color or a few shades only,
on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, higl
and low, and founded on facil This closed car smells of salt
fish, the strong New England and commercial scent, remind
ing me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not
seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that
nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the
saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the
streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind
it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it
up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until
at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be
animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure ar
a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come
out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday’s dinner. Next
Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and
the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them
were careering over the pampas of the Spanish Main, — a
t 3 rpe of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and
incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that, prac

110 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAD
tically speaking, when I have learned a man’s real disposi*
cion, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse
■n this state of existence. As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail
may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with liga-
tures, and after a twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it,
still it will retain its natural form.” The only effectual cure for
such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of
hem, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and
then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of
molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville,
/ermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who im-
ports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance
stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on
the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his
customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
before this morning, that he expects some by the next train
of prime quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.

While these things go up other things come down. Warned
by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see
some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged
its way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot
like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and
scarce another eye beholds it ; going

“to be the mast
Of some great ammiral.”

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle
of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the
air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst
of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along
like leaves blown from the mountains by the September
gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep,
and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going
by. When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell,
the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like

WALDEN 111

lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with
their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to
their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs,
where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite
thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro’ Hills, or panting up the
western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in
at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and
sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their
kenneis in disgrace, or perchance run wdld and strike a league
with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled
past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the
track and let the cars go by; —

What's the railroad to me?

I never go to see
Where it ends.

It fills a few hollows.

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a-growing.

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have
my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and
steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world
with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their
rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long
afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by
the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant high-
way.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln,
Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favor-
able, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, v^orth

112 THE WRITINGS OF TllOREAU
importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over
the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if
the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp
which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible dis-
tance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the
universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a
distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure
tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody
which the air had strained, and which had conversed with
every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound
which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed
from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original
sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not
merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell,
but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and
notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon
beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious and at first
I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by
whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over
hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed
when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the
cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appre-
ciation of those youths’ singing, when I state that I per-
ceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and
they were at length one articulation of Nature.

Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer,
after the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills
chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by
my door, or upon the ridge-pole of the house. They would
begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within
five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of
the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become
acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five
at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar
behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only

WALDEN 113

the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing
sound like a fly in a spider^s web, only proportionally louder.
Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods
a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I
was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the
night, and were again as musical as ever just before and
about dawn.

When other birds are still, the screech owls take up ^*he
strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their
dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags!
It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but,
without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual
consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the
delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love
to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the
woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing
birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the
regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen
souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and
did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their
wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their trans-
gressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and
capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-
o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-nl sighs one on this
side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then — that I never
had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with
tremulous sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far
in the Lincoln woods.

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you
could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if
she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her
choir the dying moans of a human being, — some poor weak
relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like
an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,

114 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness, — I
find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imi-
tate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelat-
inous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and
courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and
insane bowlings. But now one answers from far woods in a
strain made really melodious by distance , — Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part is suggested onl^
pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, sum-
mer or winter.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and
maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to
swamps and twiliglit woods which no day illustrates, suggest-
ing a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not
recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied
thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands
hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above,
and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the par-
tridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and
fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to
express the meaning of Nature there.

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons
over bridges,— a sound heard farther than almost any other
at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the
lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In
the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs,
the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers,
still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
lake, — if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for
though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, —
who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old
festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and
solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost
its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches,
and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory

WALDEN 113

of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and
distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-
leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chops, under
this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned
water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation
tr-r-r-oonkj tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes
over the water from some distant cove the same password re-
peated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped
down to his mark; and when this observance has made the
circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremo-
nies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn re-
peats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and
flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the
bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the
morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond,
but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing
for a reply.

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing
from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the
while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing
bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly
the most remarkable of any bird’s, and if they could be
naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become
the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor
of the goose and the hooting of the owl ; and then imagine the
cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords’
clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to hi
tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks, lo
walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels
crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resound-
ing earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds, — think
of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be
early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day
of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and
wise? This foreign bird’s note is celebrated by the poets of

116 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
all countries along with the notes of their native songsters.
All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more in-
digenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his
lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the
Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill
sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither
dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there
was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor
the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor
the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one.
An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of
ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were
starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels
on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the
ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare
or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl
behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the
pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an
oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing.
No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yardl
but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young
forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs
and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar;
sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles
for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house.
Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine
tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house
for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the
Great Snow, — no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the
civilized world.

SOLITUi^E

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one
sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and
come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As
I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves,
though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see noth-
ing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually con-
genial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and
the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind
from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and
poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the
lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves
raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the
smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind
still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and
some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is
never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek
their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam
the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watch-
men, — links which connect the days of animated life.

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been
there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a
wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut
leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the woods take
some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with
by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or ac-
cidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a
ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if
visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended
twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of

117

118 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace
left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and
thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile
distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I
was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along
;he highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our hori-
zon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just
at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing,
familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some
way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I
this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfre-
quented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men?
My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is
visible from any place but the hill- tops within half a mile of
my own. I have m}^ horizon bounded by woods a)l to myself ;
a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on
the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland
road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where
I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New
England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars,
and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a
traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than
if I were the first or last man ; unless it were in the spring,
when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for
pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond
of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, —
but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left
‘^the world to darkness and to me,^^ and the black kernel of
the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood.
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the
dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and
candles have been introduced.

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and
tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be
found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope

WALDEN 119

and most melancholy man. There can be no very black
melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has
his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was
iEolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can
rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.
While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that noth-
ing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which
waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not
drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it pre-
vents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoe-
ing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to
rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands,
it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being
good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when
I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were
more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that
I am conscious of ; as if I had a warrant and surety at their
hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided
and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they
flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least op-
pressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few
weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted
if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene
and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant.
But 1 was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in
my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovej-y. In the midst of
a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly
sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in
the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight
around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness
all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the
fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and
I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle
expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I
was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something
kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call

120 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and
humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no
place could ever be strange to me again. —

“Mourning untimely consumes the sad;

Few are their days in the land of the living,

Beautiful daughter of Toscar.’^

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house
for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their
ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered
in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take
root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains
which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood
ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge
out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all
entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy
thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across
the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular
spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and
four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-
> 5 tick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with
awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more dis-
tinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came
down out of the, harmless sky eight years ago. Men fre-
quently say to me, “I should think you would feel lonesome
down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and
snowy days and nights especially.’’ I am tempted to reply
to such, — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point
in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most dis-
tant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk
cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should
I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important
question. What sort of space is that which separates a man

WALDEN 121

from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that
no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to
one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not
to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room,
the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon
Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to
the perennial source of our life, vdience in all our experience
we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the
water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary
with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man
will dig his cellar. ... I one evening overtook one of my
townsmen, who has accumulated what is called “a hand-
some property,'' — though I never got a jair view of it,-- on
the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who in-
quired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many
of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I
liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness
and the mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which place he
would reach some time in the morning.

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead
man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where
that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant
to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying
and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They
are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things
is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the
grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is
not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love
so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

“How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile
powers of Heaven and of Earth I"

“We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we
seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with,
the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them."

“They cause that in all the universe men purify and

122 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday
garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors.
It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere,
above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all
sides.’’

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a
little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of
our gossips a little while under these circumstances, — have
our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, “Vir-
tue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of
necessity have neighbors.”

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane
sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof
from actions and their consequences; and all things, good
and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved
in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or
Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by
a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be
affected by an actual event which appears to concern me
much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the
scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am
sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as
remote from myself as from another. However intense my
experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a
part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spec-
tator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that
is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the
tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was
a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he
was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion
that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most
part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when

WALDEN 123

we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is al-
ways alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured
by the miles of space that intervene between a man and hif
fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded
hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the
desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods
all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because
he is employed ; but when he comes home at night he cannot
sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but
must be where he can ‘^see the folks,’^ and recreate, and, as
he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and
hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house
all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues;”
but he does not realize that the student, though in the house,
is still at work in hh field, and chopping in his woods, as
the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and
society that the latter does, though it may be a more con-
densed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short
intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for
each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each
other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We
have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette
and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and
that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-
office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night;
we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over
one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for
one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all
important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in
a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be
better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as
where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we
should touch him.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of
famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness

124 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to
bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him,
ind which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and
mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered
by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to
know that we are never alone.

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially
in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few
comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situa-
tion. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that
laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company
has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue
devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.
The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there some-
times appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone,
— but the devil, he is far trom being alone; he sees a great
deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a
single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or
sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely
than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or
the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw,
or the first spider in a new house.

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when
the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from
an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to
have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with
pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new
eternit}^; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful eve-
ning with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
without apples or cider, — a most wise and humorous friend,
whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever
did Goffe or Whailey; and though he is thought to be dead,
none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too,
dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in
whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gath-
ering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius

WALDEN 12S

of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farthei
than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every
fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents
occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame^
who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to out-
live all her children yet.

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, —
of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such
health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympath]'
have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be af-
fected and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh
humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed
their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man
should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intel-
ligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable
mould myself?

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?
Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grand-
mother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by
which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many
old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying
fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials
of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which
come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wag-
ons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me
have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If
men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day,
why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the
shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscrip-
tion ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it
will keep quite til) noonday even in the coolest cellar, but
drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the
steps of Aurora. 1 am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the
daughter of that old herb-doctor iEsculapius, and who is
represented on monuments holding a serpent in one handj
and in the other a cup out ^‘f which the serpent sometimes

126 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who W’as
the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power
of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was
probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy,
and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wher-
ever she came it was spring.

VISITORS

1 THINK that I love society as much as most, and am ready
enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to
any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally
no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequentei
of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for
friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger
and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for
them all, but they generally economized the room by stand-
ing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a
small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty
souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we
often parted without being aware that we had come very
near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and
private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge
halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other
munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for
their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the
latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am sur-
prised when the herald blows his summons before some
Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping
out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a
house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from
my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big
words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing
trim and run a course or two before they make their port.
The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral

127

128 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course
before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out
again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted
room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. In-
dividuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural
boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between
them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the
pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we
were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not
epeak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones
into calm water so near that they break each other’s undula-
tions. If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we
can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and
feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and
thoughtfully, we w^ant to be farther apart, that all animal
heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we
would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each
of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must
not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we
cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Re-
ferred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those
who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things
which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation
began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually
shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in
opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room
enough.

My ^^best” room, however, my withdrawing room, always
ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was
the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days,
when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless
domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept
the things in order.

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal,
and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a
hasty-pudding, or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf

WALDEN 129

of bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. But if twenty came
and sat in my house there was nothing said about dinner,
though there might be bread enough for two, more than if
eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised ab-
stinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against
hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. The
waste and decay of physical life, which sc' often needs repair,
seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital
vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as
well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or
hungry from my house when they found me at home, they
may depend upx)n it that I sympathized with them at least.
So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish
new and better customs in the place of the old. You need
not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my
own part, I was never so effectually deterred from fre-
quenting a man’s house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever,
as by the parade one made about dining me, which I took to
be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him
so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should
be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of
Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow
walnut leaf for a card: —

“Arrived there, the little house they fill,

Ne looke for entertainment where none was ;

Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:

The noblest mind the best contentment has.”

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth
Colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to
Massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and
hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but
nothing was said about eating that day. When the night ar-
rived, to quote their own words, — ^“He laid us on the bed
with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the

130 THE WRITINGS Of THOREAU
other, it being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a
thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of
room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary
of our lodging than of our journey.’^ At one o’clock the next
day Massasoit ^^brought two fishes that he had shot,” about
thrice as big as a bream. “These being boiled, there were at
least forty looked for a share in them; the most eat of them.
This meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not
one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey
fasting.” Fearing that they would be light-headed for want
of food and also sleep, owing to “the savages^ barbarous sing-
ing, (for they use to sing themselves asleep,)” and that they
might get home while they had strength to travel, they de-
parted. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly enter-
tained, though what they found an inconvenience was no
doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was con-
cerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better.
They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser
than to think that apologies could supply the place of food
to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said
nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited them,
it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency
in this respect.

As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period
of my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there
under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere
else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this
respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance
from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of
solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the
most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the
finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were
wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated con-
tinents on the other side.

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true

WALDEN \3l

Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable and
poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, — a
Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole
fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a wood-
chuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer,
and, “if it were not for books,’' would “not know what to do
rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly
through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pro-
nounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the
Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must
translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles’ reproof
to Patrocius for his sad countenance. — “Why are you in
tear^ Patrocius, like a young girl?” —

“Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?

They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,

And Peleus lives, son of ^Eacus, among the Myrmidons,

Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.”

He says, “That’s good.” He has a great bundle of white oak
bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday
morning. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a
thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great writer,
though what his v/riting was about he did not know. A more
simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and
disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world,
seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about
twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s
house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn
money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native coun-
try. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish
body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck,
dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were
occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat grav cloth
cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He
was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his diruisr to

132 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
his work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chooped
all summer, — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold wood-
chucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a
string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink.
He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without
anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit.
He wasn’t a-going to hurt himself. He didn’t care if he only
earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in
the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way,
and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the
cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first
for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond
safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon these themes.
He would say, as he went by in the morning, “How thick the
pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I
could get all the meat I should want by hunting, — pigeons,
woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, — by gosh! I could get all
I should want for a week in one day.”

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes
and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to
the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might
be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps;
and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded
wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter
which you could break off with your hand at last.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary
and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment
which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy.
Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees,
and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satis-
faction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he
spoke English as well. When I approached him he would sus-
pend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the
trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the
inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed
and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he

WALDEN 133

that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground
with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled
him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim, —
George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I
want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he
amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistoL
firing salutes to himself at regular ’ntervals as he walked.
In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his
coffee in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the
chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his
arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that
he ^‘liked to have the little fellers about him.”

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical
endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and
the rock. 1 asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at
night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere
and serious look, ^‘Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.”
But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him
were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only
in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic
priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never edu-
cated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree
of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but
kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong
body and contentment for his portion, and propped him on
every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out
his threescore years and ten a ctiild. He was so genuine and
unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce
him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your
neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would
not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so
helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opin-
ions with them. He was so simpl}»* and naturally humble —
he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility
was no distinct quality in him^ nor could he conceive of it.
Wiser men were demigods to him* If you told him that such

134 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
a. one was coming, he did as if he thought that an)d:hing
so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the
responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He
never heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced
die writer and the preacher. Their performances were mira-
cles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought
for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I
meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself.
I sometimes found the name of his native parish hand-
somely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper
French accent, and knew that he had passed. T asked him if
he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had
read and written letters for those who could not, but he never
tried to write thoughts, — no, he could not, he could not tell
wha^ to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spell-
ing to be attended to at the same time!

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked
him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he
answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent,
not knowing that the question had ever been entertained
before, ^‘No, I like it well enough.’^ It would have suggested
many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To
a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general ;
yet I sometimes saw' in him a man whom I had not seen
before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shake-
speare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect
him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A towns-
man told me that when he met him sauntering through the
village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to him-
self, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in
which last he was considerably expert. The former was a
sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an
abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it doe':^ to a con-
siderable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms
of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most

WALDEN 135

simple and practical light. He had never heard such things
before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn
the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good.
Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country
afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock
leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better
than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could
do without money, he showed the convenience of money in
such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philo-
sophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the
very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his prop'-
erty, and ht wished to get needles and thread at the store^
he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to
go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to
that amount. He could defend many institutions better than
any philosopher, because, in describing them as they con-
cerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and
speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another
time, hearing Plato’s definition of a man, — a biped without
feathers, — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called
it Plato’s man, he thought it an important difference that
the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim,
“How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!” I
asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months,
if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord,” said he,
“a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the
ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the man you hoe
with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be
there; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me
first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement.
One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with
himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the
priest without, and some higher motive for living. “Satis-
fied!” said he; “some men are satisfied with one thing, and
some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough,
will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and

136 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
his belly to the table, by George P’ Yet I never, by any
manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view oi
things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a
simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to
appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I
suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely
answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too
late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like
virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight,
to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he
was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a
phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to
observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many
of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and per-
haps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a
presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primi-
ti\e and immersed in his animal life, that, though more
promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to
anything which can be reported. He suggested that there
might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however
permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view
always, or do not pretend to see at all ; who are as bottomless
even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may
be dark and muddy.

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the
inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for
a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and
ointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I
ved, I was not exempted from that annual visitation which
uccurs, methinks, about the first of April, when everybody is
on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there
were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted
men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me ; but
I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and
make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the

WALDEN 137

theme of our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed,
I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers
of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was
time that the tables were turned. ,Vith respect to wit, I
learned that there was not much difference between the half
and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-
minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as
fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to
keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and ex-
pressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost
simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather infer tor, to any-
thing that is called humility, that he was ^‘deficient in intel-
lect.” These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet
he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another.

have always been so,” said he, ^^from my childhood; 1
never had much mind ; I was not like other children ; I am
weak in the head. It was the Lord^s will, I suppose.” And
there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a
metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on
such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so
tru 3 all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he
appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know
at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that
from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-
headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to
something better than the intercourse of sages.

I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly
among the town^s poor, but who should be; who are among
the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your
hospitality, but to your hospitalality\ who earnestly wish
to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information
that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves.
I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though
he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he
got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not
know when their visit had terminated, though I went ahou^

138 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
my business again, answering them from greater and greater
remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me
in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they
knew what to do with ; runaway slaves with plantation man-
ners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable,
as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and
looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, —

Christian, will you send me back?’’

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to
forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen
with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand
ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to
take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug,
a score of them lost in every morning’s dew, — and become
frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of
legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all
3ver. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write
their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too
good a memory to make that necessary.

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visi-
tors. Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad
to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the
flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even
farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of
the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other ;
and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods
occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless com-
mitted men, whose time wa.s all taken up in getting a living
or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed
a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of
opinions; doctors, lawyers, lineasy housekeepers who pried
into my cupboard and bed when I was out, — ^how came Mrs.

to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers? —

young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded

WALDEN 139

that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions,
— all these generally said that it was not possible to do so
much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old
and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought
most of sickness, and sudden accident and death ; to them life
seemed full of danger, — what danger is there if you don’t
think of any? — and they thought that a prudent man would
carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on
hand at a moment’s warning. To them the village was literally
a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would
suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a
medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is
always danger that he may die, though the danger must be
allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to
begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. Finally, there
were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who
thought that I was forever singing, —

This is the house that I built;

This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was, —

These are the folks that worry the man

That lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I
feared the men-harriers rather.

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come
a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in
clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers;
in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for
freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready
to greet with, — ^‘Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, English-
men!” for I had had communication with that race.

THE BEAN-FIELD

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added to-
gether, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be
hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the
latest were in the ground ; indeed they were not easily to be
put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-
respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to
love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted.
They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like
Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows.
This was my curious labor all summer, — to make this portion
of the earth^s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild
fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What
shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe
them, early and late I have an eye to them ; and this is my
day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries
are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what
fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean
and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all
woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an
acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however,
the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go for-
ward to meet new foes.

When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was
brought from Boston to this my native town, through these
very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest
scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has
Waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand

140

WALDEN 141

here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my
supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all
around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Al-
most the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root
in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that
fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the
results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean
leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.

I planted about two acres and a half of upland ; and as it
was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and
I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not
give it any manure ; but in the course of the summer it ap-
peared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that
an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn
and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to
some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.

Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the
road, or the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the
dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, — I
would advise you to do all your work if possible while the
dew is on, — I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in
my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in
the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic
artist in the dewy and crumbling' sand, but later in the day
the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe
beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow
gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods,
the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could
rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the
green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made an-
other bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the
bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown,
making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean
leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and
millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, —
this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or

142 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of hus-
bandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate
with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when
pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst
form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral,
and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola
laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lin-
coln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at
their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely
hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of
the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and
thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great
distance on either side of the road, so they made the most
of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of
travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ear:
^^Beans so late! peas so late! ” — for I continued to plant when
others had begun to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had
not suspected it. “Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fod-
der.” “Does he live there?” asks the black bonnet of the gray
coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful
dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure
in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little
waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were two
acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two
hands to draw it, — ^there being an aversion to other carts and
horses, — and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they
rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had
passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural
world. This was one field not in Mr. Colman’s report. And, by
the way, who estimates the value of the crop which nature
yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The crop
of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated,
the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond-holes in
the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various
crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the con-
necting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some

WALDEN 143

states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others
savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad
sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully
returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated,
and my hoe played the Ranz dcs V aches for them.

Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the
brown thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him- — all
the morning, glad of your society, that would find out an-
other farmer’s field if yours were not here. While you are
planting the seed, he cries, — ^'Drop it, drop it, — cover it up,
cover it up, — ^pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.” But this was
not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You
may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini per-
formances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your
planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was
a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe,
I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval
years lived under these heavens, and their small implements
of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern
day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of
which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian
fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and
glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil.
When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed
to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my
labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It
was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and
I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered
at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend
the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny
afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote
in the eye, or in heaven’s eye, falling from time to time with
a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope re-
mained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the

144 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ground on bare sand or rooks on the tops of hills, where few
have found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up
from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in
the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is
aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys,
those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental
unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair
of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and
descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they
were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted
by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with
a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or
from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish
portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of
Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to
lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw
anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertain-
ment which the country offers.

On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music
occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my
bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded
as if a puffball had burst; and when there was a military
turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a
vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease
in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there
soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields
and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the
‘‘trainers.’’ It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s
bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to
Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most
sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call
them down into the hive again. And when the sound died
quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable
breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone

WALDEN 145

of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now
their minds were bent on the honey with which it was
smeared.

I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and
of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned
to mv hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible con-
fidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust
in the future.

When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded
as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings
expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But some-
times it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached
these wooas, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I fell
as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, — for why
should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for
a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These
martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and re-
minded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a
slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops
which overhang the village. This was one of the great days;
though the sky had from my clearing only the same ever-
lastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no differ-
ence in it.

It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which
I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and
harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them,
— ^the last was the hardest of all, — I might add eating, for I
did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were
growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till
noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other
affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one
makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some itera-
tion in the account, for there was no little iteration in the
labor, — disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly,
and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling
whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating an-

146 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
other. That’s Roman wormwood, — that’s pigweed, — that’s
sorrel, — ^that’s piper-grass, — ^have at him, chop him up, turn
his roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the
shade, if you do he’ll turn himself t’other side up and be as
green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but
with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews
on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue
armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling
up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-
waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding
comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.

Those summer days which some of my contemporaries
devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to
contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or
New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England,
devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I
am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned,
whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them
for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only
for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-
maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which,
continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though
I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I
hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid
for it in the end, ^There being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “no
compost or Isetation whatsoever comparable to this continual
motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the
spade.” “The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh,
has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt,
power, or '/irtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the
logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain
us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the
vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this
being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which
enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby

WALDEN 147

thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits’’ from the air. I har-
vested twelve bushels of beans.

But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr.
Colman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of
gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, —

For a hoe $0 54

Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing . 7 50 Too much.

Beans for seed 3 12^4

Potatoes “ 1 33

Peas “ 0 40

Turnip seed 0 06

White line for crow fence .... 0 02

Horse cultivator and boy three hours 1 00

Horse and cart to get crop .... 0 75

In all $14 72>^

My income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem
esse oportet), from

Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold . . $16 94

Five “ large potatoes 2 50

Nine “ small 225

Grass 1 00

Stalks 075

In all $23 44

Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere

said, of $8 7H/^

This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant
the common small white bush bean about the first of June,
lu rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to
select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for
worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look

148 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will
nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go ;
and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance,
they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds
and young pods, sitting erect Uke a squirrel. But above all
harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and
have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by
this means.

This further experience also I gained: I said to myself,
I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry an-
other summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as
sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like,
and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil
and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been
exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but
now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and
I am obliged to say to you. Reader, that the seeds which I
planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not
come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers
were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant
corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did
centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there
were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth
time at least, and not for himself to lie down in. But why
should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not
lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop,
and his orchards, — ^raise other crops than these? Why con-
cern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be
concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should
really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure
to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which
we all prize more than those other productions, but which are
for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken
root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and inef-

WALDEN 149

fable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the
slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our
ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds
as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the
land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.
We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by
our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and
friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men 1
do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are
busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thuf
plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between
his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the
earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and
walking on the ground: —

‘^And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again, — ”

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with
an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but it always
does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and
makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed
us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share
any unmixed and heroic joy.

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that hus^
bandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irrev-
erent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have
large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor
procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and
so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a
sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its
sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt
him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but
to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and
a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding
the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property

ISO THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows
Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agricul-
ture are particularly pious or just {maximeque plus quaes-
tus), and according to Varro the old Romans “called the
same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who
cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and they alone were
left of the race of King Saturn.”

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.
They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former
make but a small part of the glorious picture which he be-
holds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally
cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the
benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and
magnanimity. What though I value the seeds of these beans,
and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field
which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the princi-
pal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial
to it, which water and make it green. These beans have
results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow
for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica,
obsoletely speca^ from spe, hope) should not be the only
hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain {granum, from
gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our
harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the
weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters
little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns.
The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squir-
rels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chest-
nuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day,
relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and
sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

THE VILLAGE

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the fore-
noon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across
one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor
from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle v/bich
study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.
Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of
the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to news-
paper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really
as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping
of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squir-
rels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys;
instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle.
In one direction from my house there was a colony of musk-
rats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and button-
woods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as
curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting
at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to
gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The
village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side,
to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s on State
Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other
groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former com-
modity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs,
that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring,
and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian
winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and
insensibility to pain, — otherwise it would often be painful
to hear, — without affecting the consciousn^^ss ^ hardly ever

151

152 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row of
such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves,
with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing
along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a
voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with
their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it
up. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was
in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip
is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied
into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I ob-
served that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the
bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary
part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-
engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged
as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one
another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and
every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of
course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the
line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the
first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their places;
and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where
long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller could
get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so escape,
paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung
out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the
appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the
fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller’s; and others
by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoe-
maker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible
standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and
company expected about these times. For the most part I
escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceed-
ing at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as
is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keep-
ing my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, ^doudly
singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices

WALDEN 153

of the Sirens, and kept out of danger/’ Sometimes I bolted
suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did
not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a
gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption
into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after
learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news, — what
had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether
the world was likely to hold together much longer, — I was
let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods
again.

It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch
myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tem-
pestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or
lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my
shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all
tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry
crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or
even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many
a genial thought by the cabin fire ^‘as I sailed.” I was never
cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encoun-
tered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in
common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to
look up at the opening between the trees above the path in
order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path,
to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or
steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt
with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not
more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods,
invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming
home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet
felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and
absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to
raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall
a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps
my body would find its way home if its master should forsake
it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance*

154 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening,
and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to
the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to
him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which
he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very
dark night I directed thus on their way two young men who
had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off
through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day
or two after one of them told me that they wandered about
the greater part of the night, close by their own premises,
and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as
there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and
the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins.
I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets,
when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with
a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts,
having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been
obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies
making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling
the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when
they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as
valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often
in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-
known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads
to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a
thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is
as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night,
of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most
trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steer-
ing like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands,
and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our
minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till
we are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be
lost, — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as

WALDEN ISS

he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we
are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we
begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the
infinite extent of our relations.

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I
went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was
seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related,
1 did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the
State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like
cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to
the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men
will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if
they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-
fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with
more or less effect, might have run ^^amok” against society;
but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me,
it being the desperate party. However, I was released the
next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the
woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair
Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those
who represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the
desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my
latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day,
though I was to be absent several days; not even when the
next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet
my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded
by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm
himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few
books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet
door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I
had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came
this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from
these sources, and I never missed anything but one small
book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly
gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by
this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as

1S6 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be un-
known. These take place only in communities where some
have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.
The Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed.

‘^Nec bella fuerunt,

Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.”

^^Nor wars did men molest,

When only beechen bowls were in request.”

''You who govern public affairs, what need have you to em-
ploy punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be vir-
tuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind ; the
virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when
the wind passes over it, bends.”

THE PONDS

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gos-
sip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still
farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more un-
frequented parts of the town, ^Ho fresh woods and pastures
new,’^ or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of
huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid
up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their
true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises
them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet
few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckle-
berries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error
to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never
plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they
have not been known there since they grew on her three hills.
The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the
bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they be-
come mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not
one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from
the country’s hills.

Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I
joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on
the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck,
or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of
philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time I arrived,
that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites. There was
one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of
woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a
building erected for the convenience of fishermen ; and I was
equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his^

157

ISS THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one
end of the boat, and I at the other; but not many words
passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years,
but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well
enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was thus alto-
gether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to re-
member than if it had been carried on by speech. When, as
was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used
to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of
my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and
dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie
his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded
vale and hillside.

In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the
flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed,
hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed
bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest.
Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time
to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and,
making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought at-
tracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms
strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night,
threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets,
which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a
loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness.
Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the
haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the
shore.

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family
had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with
a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight
fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and
foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of
some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were
very memorable and valuable to me, — ^anchored in forty feet
of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded

WALDEN 159

sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling
the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicat-
ing by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes
which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes
dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the
gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration
along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity,
of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make
up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over
hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the
upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when
your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes
in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to inter-
rupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed
as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well
as downward into this element, which was scarcely more
dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though
very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it
much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived
by its shore ; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and
purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and
deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three
quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and
a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak
woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds
and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the
water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the
southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one
hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a
third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Con-
cord waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a
distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first
depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear

160 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance,
especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike.
In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate-color.
The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another
without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have
seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow,
both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some con-
sider blue be the color of pure water, whether liquid or
solid.” But, looking directly down into our waters from a
boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden
is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same
point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it
partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects
the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint
next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green,
which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the
body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop,
it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this
to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there
against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the
leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the
prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is
the color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the
spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected
from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth,
melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen
middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in
clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect
the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light
mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue
than the sky itself ; and at such a time, being on its surface,
and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I
have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such
as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more
cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark
green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared

WALDEN 161

but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as
I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen
through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single
glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an
equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of
glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its
“body,” but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How
large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a
green tint I have never proved. The water of our river is
black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on
it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one
bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such
crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an
alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs
are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous
effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be
discerned at the depth of twenty-five feet or thirty feet. Pad-
dling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the
schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet
the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and
you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a sub-
sistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I
had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch
pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the
ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or
five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was
twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice
and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on
one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently
swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it
might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time
the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making an-
other hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had,
and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in
the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which

162 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed
it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along
the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.

The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white
atones like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand
beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will
carry you into water over your head ; and were it not for its
remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen
of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it
is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer
would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of
noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently over-
flowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or
white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogctons,
and perhaps a water-target or two ; all which however a bather
might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright
like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or
two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except
in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment,
probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted
on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is
brought up on anchors even in midwinter.

We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in
Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but,
though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a
dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure
and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have
drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and
still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an inter-
mitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam
and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already
in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring-
rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and
covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not
beard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them*

WALDEN 163

Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had
clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now
wear, and obtained a patent of ' Heaven to be the only
Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who
knows in how many unremembered nations’ literatures this
has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided
over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water
which Concord wears in her coronet.

Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left
some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect
encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been
cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep
hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and reced-
ing from the water’s edge, as old probably as the race of man
here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from
time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants
of the land. This is particularly distinct to one standing on
the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has
fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured
by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile
off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguish-
able close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear
white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas
which will one day be built here may still preserve some
trace of this.

The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly oi not,
and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual,
many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter
and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the
general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foot
or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher,
than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running
into it, with very deep water on one side, on which I helped
boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore,
about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for
twenty-five years; and, on the other hand, my friends used

164 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to listen with incredulity when I told them, that a few years
later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove
in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew,
which place was long since converted into a meadow. But
the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the
summer of ^52, is just five feet higher than when I lived there,
or as hign as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again
in the meadow. This makes a difference of level, at the out-
side, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the
surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this over-
flow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs.
This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is
remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not,
appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment.
I have observed one rise and a pan of two falls, and I expect
that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as
low as I have ever known it. Flint’s Pond, a mile eastward,
allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and
outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize
with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at
the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far as
my observation goes, of White Pond.

This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this
use at least; the water standing at this great height for a year
or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills
the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge
since the last rise, — ^pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and
others, — and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore;
for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to
a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.
On the side of the pond next my house a row of pitch pines,
fifteen feet high, has been killed and tipped over as if by a
lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their
size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last
rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts its
title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees

WALDEN 165

cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of
the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from
time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders,
willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots
several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water,
and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the
effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the high
blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce
no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances.

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so
regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition
— the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth —
that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a
hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now
sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as
the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians
were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill
shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named
Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has
been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled
down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain,
at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there
is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict
with the account of that ancient settler whom I have men-
tioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with
his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and
the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to
dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they
are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on
these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are re-
markably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have
been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the
railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most
stones where the shore is most abrupt ; so that, unfortunately,
it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the
name was not derived from that of some English locality, —

166 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Saffron Walden, for instance, — one might suppose that it was
called originally Walled-in Pond.

The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the
year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times ; and I think
that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In
the winter, all water which is exposed to the air is colde/
than springs and wells which are protected from it. The tem-
perature of the pond water which had stood in the room where
I sat from five o^clock in the afternoon till noon the next day,
the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer having been up to
65® or 70® some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the
roof, was 42®, or one degree colder than the water of one
of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature
of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45®, or the warmest
of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in
summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water
is not mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never
becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun,
on account of its depth. In the warmest weather I usually
placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the
night, and remained so during the day; though I also resorted
to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week
old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump.
Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond,
needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade
of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice.

There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing
seven pounds, — to say nothing of another which carried off a
reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down
at eight pounds because he did not see him, — ^perch and
pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners,
chivins or roach {Leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams,
and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds, — I am thus
particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only
title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here;
’-also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five

WALDEN 107

inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat
dace-like in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link
my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile
in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.
I have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least
three different kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored,
most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with
greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most
common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped like
the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or
black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very
much like a trout. The specific name reticulatus would not
apply to this; it should be guttatus rather. These are all very
firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises. The
shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the fishes which
inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer-
fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, cis the
water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from
them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties
of some of them. There are also a clean race of frogs and
tortoises, and a few mussels in it ; muskrats and minks leave
their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle
\'isits it. Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat in the morn-
ing, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted him-
self under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequent
it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo
bkolor) skim over it, and the peetweets {Totanus macula-
rius) “teeter” along its stony shores all summer. I have
sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine
over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the
wing of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one
annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which
frequent it now.

You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy
eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and
also in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps

168 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting
of small stones less than a hen^s egg in size, where all around
is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians could have
formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the
ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular
and some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar
to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor
lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could be made.
Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing
mystery to the bottom.

The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have
in my mind’s eye the western, indented with deep bays, the
bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore,
where successive capes overlap each other and suggest un-
explored coves between. The forest has never so good a set-
ting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the
middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water’s
edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the
best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore,
the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no
rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe
has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees
have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends
forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature
has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just grada-
tions from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.
There are few traces of man’s hand to be seen. The water
laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive fea-
ture. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder meas-
ures the depth of his own nature. The fiuviatile trees next
the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the
wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the
pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze
jnakes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence

WALDEN 169

came the expression, “the glassy surface of a lake.” When
you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer
stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant
pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from
another. You would think that you could walk dry under it
to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over
might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below the
line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look
over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your
hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as
the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the
two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth
as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals
scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun
produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a
duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low
as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes
an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright
flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the
water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or hert
and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface,
which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten
glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are
pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may
often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from
the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water
nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap
in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect
from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the
equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what
elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, — this piscine
murder will out, — and from my distant perch I distinguish
the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in
diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) cease-
lessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile
off ; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous

170 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide
over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is
considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on
it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and
adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses
till they completely cover it. It is a soothing employment, on
one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the
sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height
as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles
which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible
surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great
expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently
smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is
jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth
again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it
is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it
were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing
of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and
thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phe-
nomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in the
spring. Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb
sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in
a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect pro-
duces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!

In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a
perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my
eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the
same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface
oi the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and
go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack,
whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature
continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface
ever fresh; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it
sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush, — this the
light dust-cloth, — ^which retains no breath that is breathed on

WALDEN 171

it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface,
and be reflected in its bosom still.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It
is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land
only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled
by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the
streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look
down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on
the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler
spirit sweeps over it.

The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter
part of October, when the severe frosts have come; and then
and in November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely
nothing to ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in
the calm at the end of a rain-storm of several days’ duration,
when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was
full of tnist, I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth,
so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no
longer reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre
November colors of the surrounding hills. Though I passed
over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations produced
by my boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave
a ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was looking
over the surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint
glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the
frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface,
being so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from
the bottom. Paddling gently to one of these places, I was
surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small
perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the
green water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the
surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In
such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting
the clouds,. I seemed to be floating through the air as in a
balloon, and their swimming impressed me as a kind of

172 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
flight or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of birds
passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins,
like sails, set all around them. There were many such schools
in the pond, apparently improving the short season before
winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight,
sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight
breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I ap-
proached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden
plash and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the
water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in
the depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and
the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher
than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three
inches long, at once above the surface. Even as late as the
fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples on the
surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately,
the air being full of mist, I made haste to take my place at
the oars and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly
increasing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I antic-
ipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased,
for they were produced by the perch, which the noise of
my oars had scared into the depths, and I saw their schools
dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all.

An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty
years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells
me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks
and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about
it. He came here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which
he found on the shore. It was made of two white pine logs
dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the
ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years
before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to the
bottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to the
pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of
hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived
by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there

WALDEN 173

was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it.
Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore ; but when
you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and
disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which
took the place of an Indian one of the same material but
more graceful construction, which perchance had first been
a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water,
to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for
the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths
there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying
on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly,
or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper;
but now they have mostly disappeared.

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely
surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in
some of its coves grape-vines had xun over the trees next the
water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The
hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on
them were then so high that, as you looked down from the
west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some
kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when 1
was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed
having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my bad
across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake,
until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I
arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to ; days
when idleness was the most attractive and productive indus-
try. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend
thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not
in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them
lavishly ; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them
in the workshop or the teacher’s desk. But since I left those
shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste,
and now for many a year there will be no more rambling
through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas
through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused

174 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to
sing when their groves are cut down?

Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log
canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the
villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going
to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water,
which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the vil-
lage in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! — to earn their
Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That
devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard
throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with
his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on
Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in
his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the
country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him
at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the
ribs of the bloated pest?

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps
Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men
have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though
the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then
that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the rail-
road has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have
skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which
my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has
not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It
is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip
apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It
struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost daily
for more than twenty years, — ^Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where
a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by
its shore as lustily as ever ; the same thought is welling up
to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and
happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me.
It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no

WALDEN 17S

guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and
clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to
Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same re-
flection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?

It is no dream of mine.

To ornament a line;

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.

I am its stony shore.

And the breeze that passes o’er ;

In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand.

And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.

The Cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that
the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passen-
gers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better
men for the sight. The engineer does not forget at night, or
his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity
and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but
once, it helps to wash out State Street and the engine’s soot
One proposes that it be called ^^God’s Drop.”

I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but
it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint’s
Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds com-
ing from that quarter, and on the other directly and mani-
festly to Concord River, which is lower, by a similar chain ol
ponds through which in some other geological period it may
have flowed, and by a little digging, which God forbid, it can
be made to flow thither again. If by living thus reserved and
austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquireC
such wonderful purity, who would not regret that the com-
paratively impure waters of Flint's Pond should be mingled

176 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the
ocean wave?

Plinths or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and in-
land sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger,
being said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres,
and is more fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow,
and not remarkably pure. A walk through the woods thither
was often my recreation. It was worth the while, if only to
feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves
run, and remember the life of mariners. I went a-chestnutting
there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping
into the water and were washed to my feet ; and one day, as
I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my
face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides
gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom
left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if
it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impres-
sive a wreck as one could imagine on the seashore, and had as
good a moral. It is by this time mere vegetable mould and
undistinguishable pond shore, through which rushes and
flags have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on
the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm
and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water,
and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines,
corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the
waves had planted them. There also I have found, in consid-
erable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently of fine
grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four
inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash back
and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are
sometimes cast on the shore. They are either solid grass, or
have a little sand in the middle. At first you would say that
they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble;
yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half

WALDEN 177

an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of
the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much
construct as wear down a material which has already acquired
consistency. They preserve their form when dry for an in-
definite period.

Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature.
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm
abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid
bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better
the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which
he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the
wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers
grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of
grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not
there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who
never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected
it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that
He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that
swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the
wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or
child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own ;
not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which
a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him, — ^him who
thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance
cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and
would fain have exhausted the waters within it ; who regretted
only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — ^there
was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would
have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not
turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I
respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price,
who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to
market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market
jor his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose
fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees
no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits,

178 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars.
Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are
respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are
poor, — ^poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands
like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen,
and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one
another I Stocked with men ! A great grease-spot, redolent of
manures and buttermilk! Under a high state of cultivation,
being manured with the hearts and brains of men! As if you
were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such is a
model farm.

No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be
named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men
alone. Let our lakes receive as true names at least as the
Icarian Sea, where “still the shore’’ a “brave attempt re-
sounds.”

Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint’s; Fair
Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some
seventy acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about
forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is
my lake country. These, with Concord River, are my water
privileges; and night and day, year in year out, they grind
such grist as I carry to them.

Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have
profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the
most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is
White Pond; — a poor name from its commonness, whether
derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color
of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it is a
lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would
say they must be connected under ground. It has the same
stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden,
in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods
on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflec-

WALDEN 179

tion from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a mist}^
bluish-green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to
go there to collect the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper
with, and I have continued to visit it ever since. One who
frequents it proposes to call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might
be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the following circumstance.
About fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch pine,
of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not
a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water,
many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that
the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest
that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1 792,
in a “Topographical Description of the Town of Concord,”
by one of its citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and
White Ponds, adds, “In the middle of the latter may be seen,
when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it
grew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are
fifty feet below the surface of the water; the top of this tree
is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in
diameter.’^ In the spring of ’49 I talked with the man who
lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me that it was
he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near
as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from
the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It
was in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the
forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the
aid of his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow pine.
He sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled
it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen; but, before
he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that it
was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches
pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the
sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at the big
end, and he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was
so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it

180 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of wood-
peckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a
dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the
pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the
butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk
wrong end up. His father, eighty years old, could not remem-
ber when it was not there. Several pretty large logs may still
be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation
of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in motion.

This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is
little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily,
which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag
{Iris versicolor) grows thirty in the pure water, rising from
the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by
hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluish blades
and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in singular
harmony with the glaucous water.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface
uf the earth. Lakes of Light. If they were permanently con-
gealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, per-
chance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn
the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and
secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them,
and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure
to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much
more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent
than our characters, are they I We never learned mearmess
of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s
door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks
come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates
her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are 3ti
harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden con-
spires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flour-
ishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk
of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

BAKER FARM

dOMETiMES I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples,
or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rip-
pling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids
would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to
the cedar wood beyond Flint’s Pond, where the trees, cov-
ered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are
fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers
the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where
the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce
trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover
the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like
butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-
pink and dogwood grow, the red alder berry glows like eyes
of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods
in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the beholder
forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and
tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair
for mortal taste. Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid
many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in
this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some
pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop ;
such as the black birch, of which we have some handsome
specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow birch,
with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first ; the beech,
which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, per-
fect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens,
I know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the town-
ship, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons
that were once baited with beechnuts near by; it is worth

181

182 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this
wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis occidentals, or
false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some taller
mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than
usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and
many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rain-
bow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere,
tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I
looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light,
in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had
lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life.
As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at
the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy
myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the
shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo about
them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished.
Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that after a certain
terrible dream or vision which he had during his confine-
ment in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light appeared
over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether
he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicu-
ous when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably
the same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is
especially observed in the morning, but also at other times,
and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it is not
commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagina-
tion like Cellini’s, it would be basis enough for superstition.
Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few. But are
they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they
are regarded at all?

I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven,
through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables.

WALDEN 183

My way led through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the
Baker Farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung,
beginning, —

^^Thy entry is a pleasant field.

Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook.

By gliding musquash undertook,

And mercurial trout.

Darting about/’

I thought of living there before I went to Walden, I
‘^hooked” the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the mus-
quash and the trout. It was one of those afternoons which
seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may
happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was
already half spent when I started. By the way there came
up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour
under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my
handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made
one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle
in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud,
and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I
could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud,
thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed
fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut,
which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the
nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited: —

^^And here a poet builded,

In the completed years,

For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers.”

So the Muse fables, But therein, as I found, dwelt now John
Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from

184 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and
now came running by his side from the bog to escape the
rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat
upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked
out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively
upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing
but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure
of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starveling brat.
There we sat together under that part of the roof which
leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. I
had sat there many times of old before the ship was built
that floated this family to America. An honest, hard-working^
but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife, she
too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the
recesses of that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare
breast, still thinking to improve her condition one day; with
the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it
visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also taken shelter
here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of
the family, too humanized, methought, to roast well. They
stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe signifi-
cantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he
worked ‘^bogging” for a neighboring farmer, turning up a
meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an
acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and
his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's
side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had
made. I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that
he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came
a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living
like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house,
which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin
as his commonly amounts to ; and how, if he chose, he might
in a month or two build himself a palace of his own ; that I
did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh
meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I

WALDEN 18 S

did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me
but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee,
and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay
for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard
again to repair the waste of his system, — ^and so it was as
broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long,
for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain;
and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that
here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But
the only true America is that country where you are at liberty
to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without
these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you
to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses
which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.
For I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or
desired to be one. I should be glad if all the meadows on the
earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence
of men’s beginning to redeem themselves. A man will not need
to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be
undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as
he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and
stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but
I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so
much, though he might think that I was dressed like a gentle-
man (which, however, was not the case) , and in an hour or
two, without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished,
catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn
enough money to support me a week. If he and his family
would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the
summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and
his wife stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be
wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course
with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing
by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to
make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life

186 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and
nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any
fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail; — thinking to deal
with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But they
fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, — living, John Field,
alas! without arithmetic and failing so.

^‘Do you ever fish?^’ I asked. ^‘Oh yes, I catch a mess now
and then when I am lying by; good perch I catch.” “What’s
your bait?” “I catch shiners with fishworms, and bait the
perch with them.” “You’d better go now, John,” said his
wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but John demurred.

The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern
woods promised a fair evening; so I took my departure.
When I had got without I asked for a drink, hoping to get a
sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the
premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and
rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. Meanwhile
the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seem-
ingly distilled, and after consultation and long delay
passed out to the tliirsty one, — not yet suffered to cool, not
yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so,
shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully di-
rected undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the
heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish in such cases
when manners are concerned.

As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, bending
my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wad-
ing in retired meadows, in sloughs and bogholes, in forlorn
and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who
had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the
hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my
shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear
through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my
Good Genius seemed to say, — Go fish and hunt far and wide
day by day, — farther and wider, — and rest thee by many
brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy

WALDEN 187

Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before
the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by
other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home.
There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than
may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like
these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay.
Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers^
crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the
cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a
living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it
not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they
are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.

O Baker Farm I

‘^Landscape where the richest element
Is a little sunshine innocent.’’ . . .

^^No one runs to revel
On thy rail-fenced lea.” . . .

^^Debate with no man hast thou,

With questions art never perplexed,

As tame at the first sight as now,

In thy plain russet gabardine dressed.” • . .

^^Come ye who love.

And ye who hate,

Children of the Holy Dove,

And Guy Faux of the state.

And hang conspiracies

From the tough rafters of the trees! ”

Men come tamely home at night only from the next field oi
street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life
pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their
shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily

188 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and
perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and
character.

Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had
brought out John Field, with altered mind, letting go
^^bogging^^ ere this sunset. But he, poor man, disturbed only
a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said
it was his luck; but when we changed seats in the boat luck
changed seats too. Poor John Field! — I trust he does not read
this, unless he will improve by it, — thinking to live by some
derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country, —
to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow.
With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be
poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adames
grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he
nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet
get talaria to their heels.

HIGHER LAWS

AS I came home through the woods with my string of fish,
trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse
of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange
thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and
devour him raw ; not that I was hungry then, except for that
wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while
I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a
half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking
some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel
could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had
become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still
find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual
life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and
savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not
less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in
fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take
rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do.
Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting,
when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They
early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which
otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.
Fisliermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their
lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of
Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for
observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philos-
ophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She
is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the
prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the
Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St.

189

190 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at
second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We
are most interested when science reports what those men al-
ready know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true
humanity j or account of human experience.

They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amuse-
ments, because he has not so many public holidays, and men
and boys do not play so many games as they do in England,
for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunt-
ing, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the
former. Almost every New England boy among my contem-
poraries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten
and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not
limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were
more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder,
then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common.
But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an in-
creased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for
perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals
hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.

Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add
fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from the
same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever
humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and
concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of
fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling,
and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am
less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feel-
ings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the
worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years
that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying
ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess
that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of
studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer
attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason
only, I hav^ been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstand-

WALDEN 191

ing the objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled
to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for
these ; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously
about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have
answered, yes, — remembering that it was one of the best
parts of my education , — make them hunters, though sports-
men only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that
they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any
vegetable wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men.
Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer’s nun, who

“yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men.”

There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the
race, when the hunters are the ^‘best men,” as the Algonquin?
called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired
a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been
sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those
youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they
would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thought-
less age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which
holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its
extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my
sympathies do not always make the usual ^hW-anthropic
distinctions.

Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest,
and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first
as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a
better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet
or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole be-
hind. The mass of men are still and always young in this
respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon
sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd’s dog, but is
far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to
consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-

192 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAX)
chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my
knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half-day any
of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town,
with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not
think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless
they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity
of seeing the pond all the while. They might go there a thou-
sand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the
bottom and leave their purpose pure ; but no doubt such a
clarifying process would be going on all the while. The Gov-
ernor and his Council faintly remember the pond, for they
went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are
too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no
more forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last.
If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the num-
ber of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about
the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself,
impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized
communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter
stage of development.

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish
without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and
again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a cer-
tain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but
always when I have done I feel that it would have been better
if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint
intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is
unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lowei
orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman,,
though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present
I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in
a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and
hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially un-
clean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where
housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which
costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance

WALDEN 193

each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors
and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and
cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were
served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experi-
ence. The practical objection to animal food in my case was
its uncleanness ; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned
and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed
me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost
more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would
have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of
my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal
food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill
effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not
agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food
is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared
more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects;
and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my
imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been
earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best
condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from ani-
mal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant
fact, stated by entomologists, — I find it in Kirby and Spence,
— ^that ^‘some insects in their perfect state, though furnished
with organs of feeding, make no use of them;” and they lay
it down as ^^a general rule, that almost all insects in this state
eat much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar
when transformed into a butterfly . . . and the gluttonous
maggot when become a fly” content themselves with a drop
or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen
under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva.
This is the tidbit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The
gross feeder is a man in the larva state ; and there are whole
nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagina-
tion, whose vast abdomens betray them.

It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a. diet
will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be

194 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fed when we feed the body ; they should both sit down at the
same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten
temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor
interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment
into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while
to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught
preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner,
whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared
or them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not
civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and
women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made.
It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be
reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it
not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can
and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other ani-
mals; but this is a miserable way, — as any one who will go
to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, — and
he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach
man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome
diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt
that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its
gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely
as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they
came in contact with the more civilized.

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of
his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what ex-
tremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way,
as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The
faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at
length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind.
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though
the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say
that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a
life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the
night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a
fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more

WALDEN 195

dastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is your success.
All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause mo-
mentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values
are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt
if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest
reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are
never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my
daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the
tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a
segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I
could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were
necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the
same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's
heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are in-
finite degress of drunkenness. I believe that water is the
only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and
think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm
coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall
when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating.
Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome,
and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who
does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? 1
have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse
labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and
drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at
present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry
less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am
wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, how-
ever much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown
more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are en-
tertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My prac-
tice is ‘‘nowhere,” my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am
far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to
whom the Ved refers when it says, that “he who has true
faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that

196 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
exists/' that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or
who prepares it ; and even in their case it is to be observed,
as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the Vedant
limits this privilege to “the time of distress.^^

Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfac-
tion from his food in which appetite had no share? I have
been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the
commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired
through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on
a hillside had fed my genius. “The soul not being mistress
of herself,” says Thseng-tseu, “one looks, and one does not
see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one
does not know the savor of food.” He who distinguishes the
true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does
not cannot be otherwise. A puiitan may go to his brown-
bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman
to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth
defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It
is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to
sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to
sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for
the worms that possess us. If the hunter has a taste for
mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the
fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for
sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to
the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how
they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating
and drinking.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an in-
stant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only
investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which
trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which
thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Uni-
verse’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our
Kttle goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the
youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are

WALDEN 197

not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensi-
tive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely
there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot
touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral trans-
fixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, *s heard
as music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in
proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and
sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the
worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies.
Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its
nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own;
that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked
up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and
tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and
vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded
by other means than temperance and purity. “That in which
men differ from brute beasts,^^ says Mencius, “is a thing very
inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior
men preserve it carefully.’^ Who knows what sort of life
would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so
wise a man as could teach me purity I would go seek him
forthwith. “A command over our passions, and over the ex-
ternal senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the
Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.”
Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every
member and function of the body, and transmute what in
form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The
generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and
makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and in-
spires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are
called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but
various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God
when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity in-
spires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who
is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day,

198 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but
has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish
nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods
or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to
beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent,
our very life is our disgrace. —

‘‘How happy’s he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disafforested his mind!

Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast.

And is not ass himself to all the rest!

Else man not only is the herd of swine.

But he’s those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”

All sensuality is one, thought it takes many forms; all
purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or
cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and
we only need to see a person do any one of these things to
know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither
stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at
one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you
would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity?
How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it.
We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.
We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard.
From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignor-
ance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish
habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful
one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on pros-
trate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would
avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though
it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but
she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Chrisrtian,
If you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself

WALDEN 199

no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many
systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill
the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors,
though it be to the performance of rites merely.

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the
subjects, — I care not how obscene my words are, — ^but be-
cause I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity.
We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality,
and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we
cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human
nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was
reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too
trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be
to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void
excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean,
and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things
trifles.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to
the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he
get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and
painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and
bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man^s features,
any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, aftei
a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his labor more ot
less. Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual
man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors
were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train
of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a
flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he
thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was,
that though this kept running in his head, and he found him-
self planning and contriving it against his will, yet it con'
cerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his
skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the
flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from

200 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties
which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the
street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A
voice said to him, — Why do you stay here and live this mean
moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?
Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. — But
how to come out of this condition and actually migrate
thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new
austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem
it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

BRUTE NEIGHBORS

Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came
through the village to my house from the other side of the
town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social
exercise as the eating of it.

Hermit, I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not
heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours.
The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, — no flutter
from them. Was that a farmer’s noon horn which sounded
from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming in
to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will
men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not
work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would
live there where a body can never think for the barking of
Bose? And oh, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devil’s
door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better not
keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning
calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. Oh,
they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too
far into life for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf
of brown bread on the shelf. — Hark! I hear a rustling of
the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the
instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in
these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on
apace; my sumachs and sweetbriers tremble. — Eh, Mr. Poet,
is it you? How do you like the world to-day?

Poet, See those clouds; how they hang! That^s the great-
est thing I have seen to-day. There’s nothing like it in old
paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — ^unless when we
were off the coast of Spain. That’s a true Mediterranean skyr

201

202 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten
to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That’s the true industry for
poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let’s along.

Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone.
I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a
serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it.
Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we may not be
delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. Angle-
worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the
soil was never fattened with manure ; the race is nearly extinct.
The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catch-
ing the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen; and this you
may have all to yourself to-day. I would advise you to set in
the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you
see the johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one
worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in
among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you
choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found
the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of
the distances.

Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was
nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this
angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon
bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occa-
sion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the
essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts
will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I would
whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to
say, We will think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and
I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking
of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sen-
tences of Confut-see; they may fetch that state about again.
I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy.
Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind.

Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just
thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imoerfect or

WALDEN 203

undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do
not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are
quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without
finding the skewer.

Hermit, Well, then, let’s be off. Shall we to the Concord?
There’s good sport there if the water be not too high.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make
a world? Why has man just these species of animals for his
neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this
<^revice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to
their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense,
made to carry some portion of our thoughts.

The mice which haunted my hous^e were not the common
ones, which are said to have been introduced into the coun-
try, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent
one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much.
When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath
the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept
out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time
and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never
seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and
would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily
ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a
squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as
I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my
clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper
which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and
dodged and played at bopeep with it ; and when at last I held
still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came
and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its
face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.

A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection
in a pine which grew against the house. In June the par-
tridge (Tetrao umbellus)^ which is so shy a bird, led her

204 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the
front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen,
and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods.
The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal
from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and
they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many
a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and
heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious
calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his
attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent
will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a
dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what
kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often
running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their
mother’s directions given from a distance, nor will your ap-
proach make them run again and betray themselves. You
may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for
a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in
my open hand at such a time, and still their only care,
obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat
there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct,
that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one
accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly
the same position ten minutes afterward. They are not cal-
low like the young of most birds, but more perfectly de-
veloped and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably
adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes
is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them.
They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom
clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the
bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do
not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often
look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sports-
man often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these
innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or
gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so

WALDEN 20S

much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they
will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for
they never hear the mother’s call which gathers them again.
These were my hens and chickens.

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free
though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in
the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How
retired the otter manages to live here! He grows to be four
feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human
being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon
in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably
still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an
hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my
lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a
swamp and of a brook, oozing from under Brister’s Hill,
half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through
a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young
pitch pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a
very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white pine,
there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug out
the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I
could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I went
for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the
pond was warmest. Thither, too, the woodcock led her brood,
to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them
down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at
last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round
and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet,
pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention,
and get off her young, who would already have taken up
their march, with faint, wiry peep, single file through the
swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the* peep of the young
when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle
doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough
of the soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel,
coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar

206 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some
attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit
themselves to you by turns.

I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One
day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of
stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other
much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely
contending with one another. Having once got hold they
never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the
chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find
that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was
not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of
ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently
two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons
covered aU the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the
ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both
ted and black. It was the only battle which I have ever wit-
nessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was
raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand,
and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they
were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that
I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.
I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s
embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at
noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life
went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself
like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the
tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw
at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the
other to go by the board ; while the stronger black one dashed
him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had
already divested him of several of his members. They fought
with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the
least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-
cry was “Conquer or die.” In the meanwhile there came along
a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full

WALDEN 201

of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not
yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had
lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had charged him to re-
turn with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some
Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now
come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal
combat from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice the size
of the red, — ^he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on hi?
guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watch-
ing his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and
commenced his operations near the root of his right fort
leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so
there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attrac-
tion had been invented which put all other locks and cements
to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find
that they had their respective musical bands stationed on
some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the
while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. 1
was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men.
The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly
there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, ai least,
if in the history oi America, that will bear a moment’s com-
parison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or
for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and
for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight!
Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard
wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, — “Fire! for
God’s sake fire!” — and thousands shared the fate of Davis
and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no
doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as
our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their
tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and
memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle
of Bunker Hill, at least.

I took up the chip pn which the three I have particularly
described were struggling, carried into my house, and placed

208 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the
issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I
saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore
leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his
own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had
there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was
apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbun-
cles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only
could excite. I’hey struggled half an hour longer under the
tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had
severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the
still living heads were hanging on either side of him like
ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly
fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble strug-
gles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a
leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest him-
self of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he
accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the
window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally sur-
vived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in
some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that
his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never
learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war ;
but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings
excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity
and carnage, of a human battle before my door.

Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long
been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they
say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to
have witnessed them. ‘^^Eneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giv-
ing a very circumstantial account of one contested with great
obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a
pear tree,” adds that “ This action was fought in the pon-
tificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas
Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole his-
tory of the battle with the greatest A^elity.’ A similar engage-

WALDEN 209

merit between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus
Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said
to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left
those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event
happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiem
the Second from Sweden.’’ The battle which I witnessed took
place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage
of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.

Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a
victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods,
without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled
at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ holes; led perchance by
some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might
still inspire a natural terror in its denizens; — now far
behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some
small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, can^
tering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining
that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla
family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the
stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from
home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most
domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears
quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy
behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular
inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with
young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like
their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at
me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what
was called a ^^winged cat” in one of the farm-houses in
Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When I called
to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods,
as was her wont (lam not sure whether it was a male or fe-
male, and so use the more common pronoun) , but her mistress
told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than
a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their hpuse;
that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot

210 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail
like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted
out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long
by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the
upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring
these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her
‘ Vings,’^ which I keep still. There is no appearance of a mem-
brane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel
or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, ac-
cording to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced
by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would
have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept
any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his
horse?

In the fall the loon {Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual,
to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with
his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival
all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on
foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and
conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through
the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon.
Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on
that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive
here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind
rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the
water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes
sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound
with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash
angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen
must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs.
But they were too often successful. When I went to get a
pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this
stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I
endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how
he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost,
so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter

WALDEN 211

part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on
the surface. He commonly went off in a rain.

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes,
like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the
pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore to-
ward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild
laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he
dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He
dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take,
and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface
this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again
he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before.
He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a
dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface,
turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the
water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that
he might come up where there was the widest expanse of
water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was sur-
prising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve
into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the
pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking
one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought
in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface
of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary's
checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is
to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Some-
times he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of
me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So
long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had
swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, never-
theless ; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond,
beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way
like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of
the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been
caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the sur-

212 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
face, with hooks set for trout, — though Walden is deeper
than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this un-
gainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid
their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely
under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there.
Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the sur-
face, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly
dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my
oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate
where he would rise; for again and again, when I was strain-
ing my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be
startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after
displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray him-
self the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not
his white breast enough betray nim? He was indeed a silly
loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the plash of the water
when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an
hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and
swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how
serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to
the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath.
His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like
that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked
me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered
a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a
wolf than any bird ; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the
ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning, — ^per-
haps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the
woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in
derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though
the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth
that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not
hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the
smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, hav-
ing come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged
howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and im-

WALDEN 213

mediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the
surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was
impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and
his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing
far away on the tumultuous surface.

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly
tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the
sportsman; tricks which they will have less need to practise
in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would
sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a
considerable height, from which they could easily see to
other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and,
when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they
would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile
on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside
safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not
know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.

HOUSE-WARMING

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and
loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty
and fragrance than for food. There, too, I admired, though
I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants
of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks
with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,
heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar
only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New
York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers
of Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out
of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant.
The barberry’s brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes
merely; but I collected a small store of wild apples for cod-
dling, which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked.
When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter.
It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless
chestnut woods of Lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep
under the railroad, — ^with a bag on my shoulder, and a
stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not always wait
for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud re-
proofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed
nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which they had selected
were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and
shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one
large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in
flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but
the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last com-
ing in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out
of the burs before they fell. I relinquished these trees to them

214

WALDEN 215

and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good sub-
stitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be
found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the
ground-nut {Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the
aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to
doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told,
and had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its crimpled red
velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants with-
out knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh ex-
terminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a
frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted.
This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her
own children and feed them simply here at some future
period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields
this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian
tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine;
but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and
luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a
myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may
carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield
of the Indian’s God in the southwest, whence he is said to
have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-
nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and
wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some
Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and
bestower of it ; and when the reign of poetry commences here,
its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works
of art.

Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or
three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath
where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point
of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their color
told! And gradually from week to week the character of each
tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth

216 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery
substituted some new picture, distinguished by more bril-
liant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.

The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as
to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within and
on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from
entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with cold,
I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself much
to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regard-
ing my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me
seriously, though they bedded with me ; and they gradually
disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding
winter and unspeakable cold.

Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters
in November, I used to resort to tlie northeast side of Walden,
which the sun reflected from the pitch pine woods and the
stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much
pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while
you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself
by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed
hunter, had left.

When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry.
My bricks, being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned
with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the quali-
ties of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years
old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one
of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are
true qr not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere
more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with
a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the vil-
lages of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a
very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and
the cement on them is older and probably harder still. How-
ever that may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of

WALDEN 217

the steel which bore so many violent blows without being
worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though
I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I
picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save
work and waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks
about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also
made my mortar with the white sand from the same place.
I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part
of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though
I commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of
bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my
pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that
I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet
to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me
to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife, though
I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them
into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I
was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by
degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was cal-
culated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent
an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising
through the house to the heavens; even after the house is
burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and inde-
pendence are apparent. This was toward the end of summer.
It was now November.

The north wind had already begun to cool the pond,
though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish
it, it is so deep. When I began to have a fire at evening, be'
fore I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke partic-
ularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the
boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and
airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full
of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My
house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered,

218 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering
shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms
are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco
paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first
began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use
it for warmth as well as shelter, I had got a couple of old
fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me
good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which
I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more
satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could
hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being
a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attrac-
tions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever
satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from
living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a
family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa ^^cellam
oleariam, vinariam, dolia mulia, uti lubeat caritatem ex-
pectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit,’’ that is, “an oil and
wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to ex-
pect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and
glory.” I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two
quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a
little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a
peck each.

I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house,
standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without
gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room,
a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or
plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort
of lower heaven over one’s head, — ^useful to keep off rain and
snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive
your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
Saturn of ^n older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavern-

WALDEN 219

ous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole
to see the roof ; where some may live in the fireplace, some in
the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end
of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with
the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into
when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony
is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and
converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter
as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, con-
taining all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-
keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at
one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man
should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-
house, and garret ; where you can see so necessary a thing as
a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and
hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that
cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and
the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments;
where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mis-
tress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move
from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into
the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or
hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose in-
side is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot
go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing
some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented
with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully ex-
cluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell,
and told to make yourself at home there, — in solitary con-
finement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his
hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping
you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about
the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware
that J have been on many a man’s premises, and might have
been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been

220 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
in many men’s houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king
and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have de-
scribed, if I were going their way; but backing out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever
I am caught in one.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would
lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our
lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its meta-
phors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides
and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor
is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even
is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the
savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow
a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in
the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is
parliamentary in the kitchen?

However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold
enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me ; but when
they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat
rather, as if it would shake the house to its foundations.
Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.

I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought
over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the
opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance
which would have tempted me to go much farther if neces-
sary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down
to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be
able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer,
and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board
to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a
conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge
about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Ventur-
ing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his
cuffs, seized a plasterer’s board, and having loaded his
trowel without mishap, with a com,placent look toward the
lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and

WALDEN 22!

straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole
contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy
and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts
out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the
various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was sur-
prised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all
the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and
how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth.
I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by
burning the shells of the Unto fiuvtatilis, which our river
affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where
my materials came from. I might have got good limestone
within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared tO'
do so.

The pond had in. the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadi-
est and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the
general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and
perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the
best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom
where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only
an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water,
and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches
distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is neces-
sarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the
sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled
on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of
caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Per"
haps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases
in the furrows, though they aie deep and broad for them to
make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though
you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If
you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find
that the greater part of the bubbles, vLich at first appeared
to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more

222 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as
yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water
through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth
of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you
see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may
be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also
already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles
about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward;
or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles
one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these
within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those be-
neath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength
of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with
them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles
beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight
hours afterward, J found that those large bubbles were still
perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see
distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last
two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the
ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color
of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray,
and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before,
for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat
and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no
longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes,
as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was
gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious
to know what position my great bubbles occupied with
regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a
middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new
ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was
included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice,
but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps
slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch
deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find

WALDEN 223

that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great
regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition
there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of
an inch thick ; and in many places the small bubbles in this
partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no
ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in
diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute
bubbles which 1 had first seen against the under surface of the
ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree,-
had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt
and rot it. These are the little air-guns which contribute to
make the ice crack and whoop.

At length the winter set in in ^od earnest, just as I had
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the
house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night
after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark with a
clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was
covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying
low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico-
Several times, when returning from the village at ten or
eleven o’clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese,
or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole
behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and
the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In
1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night
of the 2 2d of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds
and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46,
the 16th; in ’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th
of December; in ’52, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of
December. The snow had already covered the ground since
the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the
scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and
endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and

224 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ivithin my breast. My employment out of doors now was to
collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or
on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under
each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its
best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan,
for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more
interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been
forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel
to cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are
enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of
most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present
warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young
wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course
of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with
the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad
was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking
two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly
sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one
winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly
half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet
long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied
several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a
longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged
them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as
heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very
hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the soak-
ing, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned
longer, as in a lamp.

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England,
says that ‘^the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses
and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest,” were
‘‘considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and were
severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tend-
ing ad terrorffn ferarum — ad nocumentum forestae, etc.,” to
the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest.
But I was interested in the preservation of the venison and

WALDEN 225

the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much
as though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any
part was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I
grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsol-
able than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was
cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our
farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe
which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in
the light to, a consecrated grove {lucum conlucare), that is,
would believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made
an expiatory offering, and prayed. Whatever god or goddess
thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me,
my family, and children, etc.

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even
in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent
and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and
inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious
to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they
made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux,
more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for
fuel in New York and Philadelphia “nearly equals, and some-
times exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this im-
mense capital annually requires more than three hundred
thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three
hundred miles by cultivated plains.” In this town the price of
wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much
higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and
tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other
errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a
high price for the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper.
It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for
fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the
New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and
Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of
the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the
savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to

226 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without
them.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I
loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the
better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe
which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days,
on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps
which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied
when I was plowing, they warmed me twice, — once while I
was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so
that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was
advised to get the village blacksmith to '^jump’^ it; but I
jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into
it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.

A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interest-
ing to remember how much of this food for fire is still con-
cealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often
gone ^^prospecting’^ over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine
wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They
are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at
least, will still be sound at the core, though the sap wood has
all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the
thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five
inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore
this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow,
or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth.
But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the
forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came.
Green hickory finely split makes the woodchopper’s kindlings,
when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little
of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the
horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of
Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I
was awake. —

227

WALDEN

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,

Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight.

Lark without song, and messenger of dawn.

Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;

Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;

By night star- veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;

Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,

And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of tliat,
answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left
a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon;
and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would
be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I
was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind.
It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my house-
keeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was
splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the
window and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only
time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this
score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed,
and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place
as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and
sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford
to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day.

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato,
and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after
plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals
love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive
the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on
purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed,
which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man,
having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apart-

22S THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that
his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cum-
brous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of
winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and
with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two
beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.
Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long
time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached
the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my fac-
ilities and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed
has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble our-
selves to speculate how the human race may be at last
destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time
with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating
from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Fri-
day, or greater snow would put a period to man’s existence on
the globe.

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy,
since I did not own the forest ; but it did not keep fire so well
as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no
longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be for-
gotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes
in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took
up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and
I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face
in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his
thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumu-
lated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into
the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with
new force. —

^‘Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.

What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright?

What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?

Why art thou banished from out hearth and hall,

229

WALDEN

Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?

Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our lifers common light, who are so dull?

Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?

Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,

Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire;

By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,

Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,

And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked:’"^

FORMER INHABITANTS; AND
WINTER VISITORS

I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheer-
ful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled
wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed.
For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who came
occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The ele-
ments, however, abetted me in making a path through the
deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through
the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they
lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow,
and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night
their dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged
to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within
the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my
house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabit-
ants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted
here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though
it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. In some
places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape
both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who
were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did
it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though
mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the
woodman’s team, it once amused the traveller more than now
by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where now
firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then
ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the rem-
nants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty high-

230

WALDEN 231

way, from the Stratton, now the Alms-House, Farm, to Bris-
ter’s Hill.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,
slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord
village, who built his slave a house, and gave him permission
to live in Walden Woods; — Cato, not Uticensis, but Concord-
iensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few
who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let
grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger
and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, oc-
cupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato’s half-
obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to few,
being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is
now filled with the smooth sumach {Rhus glabra), and one of
the earliest species of goldenrod {SoUdago stricta) grows there
luxuriantly.

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town,
Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun
linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with
her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At
length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by
English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and
her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led
a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of
these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon
he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot, — “Ye
are all bones, bones!” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse
there.

Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived
Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings
once, — there where grow still the apple trees which Brister
planted and tended ; large old trees now, but their fruit still
wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph
in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near
the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in
the retreat from Concord, — ^where he is styled “Sippio Bris-

232 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ter/’ — Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called, — “a
man of color,” as if he were discolored. It also told me, with
staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect
way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda,
his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large,
round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night,
such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the
woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family;
whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, but
was long since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few
stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many
a thrifty village tree.

Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the
other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground
famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old
mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part
in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any myth-
ological character, to have his biography written one day;
who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then
robs and murders the whole family, — New-England Rum.
But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here ; let
time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure
tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition
says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tem-
pered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news,
and went their ways again.

Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it
had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It
was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I
do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had
just lost myself over Davenant’s ‘‘Gondibert,” that winter that
I labored with a lethargy, — ^which, by the way, I never knew
whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who
goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes

WALDEN 233

in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sab-
bath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers^
collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly over-
came my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the
bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led
by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the fore-
most, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south
over the woods, — we who had run to fires before, — ^barn,
shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. ^‘It’s Baker’s barn,”
cried one. ^^It is the Codman place,” affirmed another. And
then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell
in, and we all shouted ‘‘Concord to the rescue!” Wagons shot
past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance,
among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who
was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine
bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all,
as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and
gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting
the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard
the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over
the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The very
nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought
to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it
was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our
engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through
speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great con-
flagrations which the world has witnessed, including Bascom’s
shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there
in season with our “tub,” and a full frog-pond by, we could
turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood.
We finally retreated without doing any mischief, — ^returned to
sleep and “Gondibert.” But as for “Gondibert,” I would ex-
cept that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s
powder, — “but most of mankind are strangers to wit, a?
Indians are to powder.”

It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the

234 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moan-
ing at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the
only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its
virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning,
lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the
still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is
his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all
day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his
own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed
into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, al-
ways lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, whicla he
remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was
absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house
being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed
by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed
me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was
covered up ; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned ; and
he groped long about the w^all to find the well-sweep which his
father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple
by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all
that he could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no
common ^‘rider.’^ I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in
my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family.

Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac
bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and
Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln.

Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road
approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted,
and furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left de-
scendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly
goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and
there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and
^^attached a chip,” for form’s sake, as I have read in his ac-
counts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on.
One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was
carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against

WALDEN 235

my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had
long ago bought a potter’s wheel of him, and wished to know
what had become of him. I had read of the potter’s clay and
wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the
pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from
those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I
was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in
my neighborhood.

The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irish-
man, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough),
who occupied Wyman’s tenement, — Col. Quoil, he was called.
Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had
lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His
trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena ;
Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He
was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and
was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to.
He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the
trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He
died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I
came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a
neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his com-
rades avoided it as “an unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay
his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon
his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, in-
stead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never
haye been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that,
though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen it;
and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were
scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the admin-
istrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even
croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next
apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden,
which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing,
owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest
time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks,

236 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a
woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house,
a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens
would he want more.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwell-
ings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries,
thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the
sunny sward there ; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies
what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch,
perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well
dent is visible, where once a spring oozed ; now dry and tear-
less grass; or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till
some late day, — ^with a flat stone under the sod, when the last
of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be, — the
covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of
tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes,
are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human
life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,^’ in some
form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I
can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that “Cato
and Brister pulled wool;^^ which is about as edifying as the
history of more famous schools of philosophy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door
and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented
flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller ;
planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard
plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and
giving place to new-rising forests; — the last of that stirp, sole
survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think
that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in
the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered,
would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the
rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and
tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century
after they had grown up and died, — ^blossoming as fair, and

WALDEN 23y

smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender,
civil, cheerful, lilac colors.

But this small village, germ of something more, why did it
fail while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural
advantages, — no water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep
Walden Pond and cool Brister’s Spring, — ^privilege to drink
long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these
men but to dilute their glass. They were universally a thirsty
race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-
parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived
here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a
numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers?
The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low-
land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these
human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!
Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler,
and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot
which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a
more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens
cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and be-
fore that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.
With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled my-
self asleep.

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay
deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or
fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow
mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived
for a long time buried in drifts, even without food ; or like that
early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this State, whose
cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717
when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole
which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved
the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about

238 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home.
The Great Snow! How cheerful it Is to hear of! When the
farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their
teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before
their houses, and, when the crust v'as harder, cut off the trees
in the swamps, ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the
next spring.

In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the high-
way to my house, about half a mile long, might have been
represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals
between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly
the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and
going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair
of dividers in my own deep tracks, — to such routine the winter
reduces us, — ^yet often they were filled with heaven’s own blue.
But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my
going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles
through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a
beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among
the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop,
and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir
trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow
was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another
snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping
and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the
hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused
myself by watching a barred owl {Slrix nebulosa) sitting on
one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk,
in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could
hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet,
but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he
would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and
open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began
to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him
half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat,
winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left

WALDEN 239

between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation
to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of
dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote
that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise
or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly
turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams
disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped
through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth,
I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided
amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neigh-
borhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with
his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in
peace await the dawning of his day.

As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad
through the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and
nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the
frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned
to it the other also. Nor was it much better by the carriage
road from Brister’s Hill. For I came to town still, like a
friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields
were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and
half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last
traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed,
through which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind
had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle
in the road, and not a rabbit’s track, nor even the fine print,
the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I
rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and
springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still
put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird oc-
casionally awaited the return of spring.

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned
from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a wood-
chopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whit-
tlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his
Dipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I

240 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
heard the crouching of the snow made by the step of a long-
headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my
house, to have a social “crack;’’ one of the few of his vocation
who are “men on their farms;” who donned a frock instead of
a professor’s gown, and is a^ ready to extract the moral out of
church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard.
We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large
fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when
other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which
wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have
the thickest shells are commonly empty.

The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deep-
est snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a
hunter, a soldier, a repvorter, even a philosopher, may be
daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by
pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His busi-
ness calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We
made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound
with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to
Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway was still and
deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there were reg-
ular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred in-
differently to the last-uttered or the forth-coming jest. We
made many a “bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of
gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the
clear-headedness which philosophy requires.

I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond
there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came
through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till
he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some
long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers, —
Connecticut gave him to the world, — ^he peddled first her
wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he ped-
dles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for
fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel, I think that he
must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and

WALDEN 241

attitude always suppose a better state of things than olfcer men
are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be dis-
appointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the
present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when
his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and
masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.-—

“How blind that cannot see serenity! ’’

A true friend of man ; almost the only friend of human prog-
ress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with un-
wearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven
in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and
leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he em-
braces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains
the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and
elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the
world’s highway, where philosophers of all nations might put
up, and on his sign should be printed, “Entertainment for man,
but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet
mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhaps the
sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to
know; the same yesterday and to-morrow. Of yore we had
sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us ;
for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus.
Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and
the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of
the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the
overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how
he can ever die ; Nature cannot spare him.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat
and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear
yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and
reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes
of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any
angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the

242 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
clouds which float through the western sky, and the
mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve
there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable
here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth
offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter!
CO converse with whom was a New England Night’s Enter-
tainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher,
and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded
and racked my little house ; I should not dare to say how many
pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on
every circular inch ; it opened its seams so that they had to be
calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent
leak; — but I had enough of that kind of oakum already
picked.

There was one other with whom I had “solid seasons,” long
to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked
in upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society
there.

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor
who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, “The house-holder
is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to
milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a
guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long
enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man
approaching from the town.

WINTER ANIMALS

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only
new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from
their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I
crossed Flint’s Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I
had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpect-
edly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baf-
fin’s Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity
of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood
before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over
the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for
sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabu-
lous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants
or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lin-
coln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house
between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond,
which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised
their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen
abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually
bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on
it, was my yard where I could walk freely when the snow was
nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were
confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and
except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells , !
slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, over-
hung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow
or bristling with icicles.

For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I
heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefi-
nitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if

243

244 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula ot
Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I
, ^ver saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my
door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables
accented somewhat like how der do\ or sometimes hoo hoo
only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond
froze over, about nine o^clock, I was startled by the loud honk-
ing of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of
their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over
my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven,
seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore
honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmis-
takable cat owl from very near me, with the most harsh and
Uemendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the
woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if deter-
mined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson’s
Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in
a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do
you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night conse-
crated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping cd such
an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well
as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the
most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord
such as these plains never saw nor heard.

I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great
bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its
bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency
and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the
ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against
my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth
a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.

Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-
crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other
game, barking raggedly and demonically like forest dogs, as

WALDEN 24S

if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling
for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets;
for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a
civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They
seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing
on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes
one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked
a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.

Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in
the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides
of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In
the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of
sweet corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow-crust by
my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the
various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and
the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal.
All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me
much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach
at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-
crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a
few paces chis way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy,
making inconceivable haste with his ‘Hrotters,’^ as if it were
for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never
getting on more than half a rod at a time ; and then suddenly
pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset,
as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all
the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of
the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,
— wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would
have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one
walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robin-
son, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up
his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing
and talking to all the universe at the same time, — ^for no
reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, 1
suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a

246 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical
way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window,
where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supply-
ing himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first
voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at
length he grew more dainty still and played with his food,
tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was
held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his
careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over
at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspect-
ing that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get
it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then
listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent
fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last,
seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than
himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it
to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag
course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it
were too heavy for him ancl falling all the while, making its
fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being
determined to put it through at any rate ; — a singularly frivo-
lous and whimsical fellow; — and so he would get off with it
to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree
forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs
strewn about the woods in various directions.

At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were
heard long before, as they were warily making their approach
an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner
they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the
kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a
pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a
kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and
after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the
endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They
V^rere manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them;

WALDEN 24t

but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if thej
were taking what was their own.

Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, pick-
ing up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the near-
est twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away
at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark,
till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A
little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of
my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting
lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else
with sprightly day day day^ or more rarely, in springlike days,
a wiry summery phe-be from the woodside. They were so
familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood
which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment,
while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was
more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have
been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also
grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped
upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way.

When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near
the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-
side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the
woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you
walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring
wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high,
which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust,
for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently
covered up by drifts, and, it is said, “sometimes plunges from
on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for
a day or two.’^ I used to start them in the open land also, where
they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud’^ the wild
apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to parties
ular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them,
and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a

248 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
little, I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is
Nature’s own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.

In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I
sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods
with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of
the chase, and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals, prov-
ing that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet
no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor fol-
lowing pack pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening
I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from
their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that
if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he
would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no
foxhound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers
far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and
when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the
hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a
wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he ap-
pears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter
told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out
on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles,
run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere
long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Some-
times a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and
circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding
me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing
could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until
they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will
forsake everything else for this. One day a man came to my
hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a
large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But
I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every
time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by
asking, ‘What do you do here?^’ He had lost a dog, but found
a man.

One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to

WALDEN H9

bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warm-
est, and at such times looked in upon me, told me thlt many
years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a
cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland road
he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox
leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped
the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not
touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her
three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and
disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he
was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the
voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing
the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all
the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well
Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood
still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter’s ear,
when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles
with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a
sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the
ground, leaving his pursuers far behind ; and, leaping upon a
rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back
to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter’s
arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought
can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang ! — the
fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead on the ground. The hunter
still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they
came, and now the near woods resounded through all their
aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst
into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air
as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but, spying the
dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck
dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in
silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their
mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the
hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery
was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox

250 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
then followed the brush a while, and at length turned off into
the woods again. That evening a Weston squire came to the
Concord hunter’s cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told
how for a week they had been hunting on their own account
from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he
knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and
departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next
day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a
farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, they
took their departure early in the morning.

The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nut-
ting, who used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and ex-
change their skins for rum in Concord village; who told him,
even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous
foxhound named Burgoyne, — he pronounced it Bugine, —
which my informant used to borrow. In the ‘‘Wast Book” of
an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk,
and representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th,
1742-3, “John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0—2—3;” they
are not now found here; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743,
Hezekiah Stratton has credit “by a Catt skin 0 — 1 — 4 ; ”

of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old
French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less
noble game. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were
daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer
that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the par-
ticulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The
hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I
remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf
by the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodi-
ous, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-horn.

At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with
hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would
skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the
bushes till I had passed.

Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There

WALDEiN 251

were scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four
inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the
previous winter, — a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow
lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large propor-
tion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive
and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them
had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after an-
other winter such were without exception dead. It is remark-
able that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine
tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it ;
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which
are wont to grow up densely.

The hares {Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had
her form under my house all winter, separated from me only
by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her
hasty departure when I began to stir, — ^thump, thump, thump,
striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They
used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato
parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color
of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when
still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered
sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I
opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a
squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity.
One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first
trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move ; a poor wee thing,
lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail
and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained
the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large
eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took
a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the
snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful
length, and soon put the forest between me and itself, — the
wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature.
Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its
nature. {Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)

2S2 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They
are among the most simple and indigenous animal products;
ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to
modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, near-
est allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another;
it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen
a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only
a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The
partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true
natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest
is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them
concealment, and they become more numerous than ever.
That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a
hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every
swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with
twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy
tends.

THE POND IN WINTER

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that
some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavor-
ing in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — ^how — ^when—
where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures
live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied
face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered
question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the
earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hiL
on which my house is placed, seemed to say, “Forward I Na-
ture puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.
She has long ago taken her resolution. “O Prince, our eyes
contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the
wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night
veils without doubt a part of this glorious fcreation; but day
comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from
earth even into the plains of the ether.”

Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and
go in search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and
snowy night it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter
the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so
sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow,
becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so
that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the
snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distin-
guished from any level field. Like the marmots in the sur-
rounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for
three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as
if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot
of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my

254 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet
parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through
a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the
same as in summer ; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns
as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and
even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our
feet as w^ell as over our heads.

Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost,
men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down
their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and
perch ; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and
trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their
goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else
they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in
stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise
in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never con-
sulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they
have done. The things which they practice are said not yet to
be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch
for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer
pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where
she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter?
Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze,
and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in nature
than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject
for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently
with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs
to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide.
He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right
to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him. The perch
swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and
the fisherman swallows the pickerel ; and so all the chinks in
the scale of being are filled.

When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was
Sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder
fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder

WALDEN 2SS

branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four
or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and
having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its
being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig
of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak
leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had
a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular inter^
vals as you walked half way round the pond.

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the
ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making
a little hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their
rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so
foreign to streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our
Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent
beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the
cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in oui
streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the
stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if
possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as
if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of
the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and
all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal king-
dom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here, —
that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the
rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the
Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never
chanced to see its kind in any market ; it would be the cynosure
of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they
give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before
his time to the thin air of heaven.

As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden
Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, earl]^
in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have
been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom ^

256 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves.
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomless-
ness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it, I have
visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neigh-
borhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite
through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat
on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive
medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and
driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in
their breasts, have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay
might be driven,’’ if there were anybody to drive it, the un-
doubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Re-
gions from these parts. Others have gone down from the vil-
lage with a “fifty-six” and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet
have failed to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was
resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain
attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for
marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has
a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at
an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a
5 tone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accu-
rately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so
much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The
greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to
which may be added the five feet which it has risen since,
making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth
for so small an area ; yet not an inch of it can be spared by
the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it
not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond
was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in
the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought
that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance
with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the
deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as
most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remark-

WALDEN 257

able valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for
this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a
vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow
plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more
hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so ad-
mirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct,
standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he
describes as ‘^a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms
deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, sur-
rounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it
ynmediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion
of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a
horrid chasm must it have appeared I

“So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
.Capacious bed of waters.”

But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply
these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears
already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will
appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased hor-
rors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many
a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly
such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded,
though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist
to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often
an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in
the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain
has been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest,
as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows
by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagi-
nation, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher
than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will
be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of

258 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying
harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its
general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres
more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun,
wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen,
the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods ; and
generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for
each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within
three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep
and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but
the effect of vv^ater under these circumstances is to level all
inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its conformity
to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so
perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the sound-
ings quite across the pond, and its direction could be deter-
mined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar,
and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel.

When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to
an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in
all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed
that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently
in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise,
and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the
line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth
exactly at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that
the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from
regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by meas-
uring into the coves ; and I said to myself. Who knows but this
hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well
as of a pond or puddle? Is not this rule also for the height of
mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that
a hill is not highest at its narrowest part.

Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were
observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper
water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of
water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and

WALDEK 259

to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two
capes showing the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-
coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In proportion as the
mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the
water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the
basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and
the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost
elements enough to make out a formula for all cases.

In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this ex-
perience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the
outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone,
I made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty-
one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible
inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very
near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes ap-
proached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ven-
tured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line,
but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The
deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of
this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined,
and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. Of course,
a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would
make the problem much more complicated.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only
one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to
infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know
only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by
any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance
of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law
and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which
we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater
number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws,
which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The par-
ticular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a
mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite
number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even

260 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its
entireness.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics.
It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not
only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in
man, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the
aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves
of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will
be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only
to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or
circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If
he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achil-
lean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his
bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a
low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our
bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a cor-
responding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the
entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each
is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and par-
tially land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical
usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by
the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation.
When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or
currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it
reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclina-
tion in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an
individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought
secures its own conditions, — changes, perhaps, from salt to
fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the ad-
vent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that
such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we
are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part,
stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only
with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public
ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they

WALDEN 261

merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to
individualize them.

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not dis-
covered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though per-
haps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may be
found, for where the water flows into the pond it will prob-
ably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the
ice-men were at work here in ’46-7, the cakes sent to the
shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them
up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the
rest ; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small
space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which
made them think that there was an inlet there. They also
showed me in another place what they thought was a ‘‘leach-
hole,” through which the pond leaked out under a hill into
a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to
see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but I
think that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till
they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested, that if
such a “leach-hole” should be found, its connection with the
meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some
colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then
putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would
catch some of the particles carried through by the current.

While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches
thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well
known that a level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from
the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of
a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice,
was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly
attached to the shore. It was probably greater in the middle.
Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we
might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When
two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the
ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall

the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference

262 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of several feet oo a tree across the pond. When I began to
cut holes for sounding there were three or four inches of water
on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far ; but
the water began immediately to run into these holes, and con-
tinued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away
the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not
mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the water ran
iin, it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like cut-
ting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. Whe?\
such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freez-
ing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled
internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider’s
web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the chan-
nels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre.
Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow pud-
dles, I saw a double shadow of myseif, one standing on the
head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or
hillside.

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick
and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get
ice to cool his summer drink ; impressively, even pathetically,
wise to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January, —
wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are
not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this
world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts
and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and
carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and
stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to
wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. It looks like
solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets.
These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport and
when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw
pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.

In the winter of ’46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyper-

WSEDEN 263

borean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning,
with n»any carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools^ —
sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes,
and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff,
such as is not described in the New-England Farmei or the
Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a
crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently intro-
duced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they
meant to slum the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was
deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a
gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to
double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half
a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars
with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of
Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to
work at once, plowing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in ad-
mirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model
farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed
they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side
suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a
peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water, —
for it was a very springy soil, — indeed all the terra firma there
was, — and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that
they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went
every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from
and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like
a flock of arctic snowbirds. But sometimes Squaw Walden
had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team,
slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus,
and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the
ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was
glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there
was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil
took a piece of steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in
the furrow and had to be cut out.

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee over-

264 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
seers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice.
They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to
require description, and these, being sledded to the shore,
were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by
grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to
a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed
evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the
solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They
told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons,
which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ^‘cradle-
holes^ ^ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage
of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably
ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets.
They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile
thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square,
putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air;
for when ihe wind, though never so cold, finds a passage
through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or
studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first
it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they
began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and
this become covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a
venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted
marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the
almanac, — his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with
us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent, of this
would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent,
would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of
this heap had a different destiny from what was intended ; for,
either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was
expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other
reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter
of ’46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was
finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was
unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, thi
rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summei

WALDEN 26S

and the next winter, and was not quite melted till September,
1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part.

Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a
green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can
easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely
greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes
one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man’s sled into
the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald,
an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a por-
tion of Walden which in the state of water was green will
often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue.
So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter,
be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the
next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of
water and ice is due to the light and air they contain,
and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interesting
subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some
in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as
good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes
putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said
that this is the difference between the affections and the
intellect.

Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred
jnen at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses
and apparently all the implements of farming, such a pic-
ture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as
I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the
reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like ; and now
the}^ are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall
look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden
water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending
up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that
a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon
laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely
fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form re-

266 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fleeted in the wave?\, where lately a hundred men securely
labored.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charles-
ton and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta,
drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the
stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta,
since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and
in comparison with which our modern world and its literature
seem puny and trivial ; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to
be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go
to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the
Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still
sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells
at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his
servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets
as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden
water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With
favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands
of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno,
and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the
Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and
islanded in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

SPRING

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly
causes a pond to break up earlier ; for the water, agitated by
the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding
ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she
had soon got a thick new garment to take the place Df the
old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this
neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its
having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the
ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not
excepting that of ’52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a
trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten
days later than Flint’s Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to
melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it
began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts
the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by
transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days’
duration in March may very much retard the opening of the
former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases al-
most uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into the middle
of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32 or freezing
point ; near the shore at 33 ; in the middle of Flint’s Pond,
the same day, at 32^°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in
shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36'’. This difference
of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the
deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact
that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show
why it should break up so much sooner that Walden. The ice
in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner
than in the middle. In midwinter the middle had been the

267

268 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one who
has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have
perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore,
where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance
out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom.
In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the
increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat
passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from
the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water
and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it
is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and
causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves
upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed,
and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice
has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot
or “comb,’’ that is, assume the appearance of honeycomb,
whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles
with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a log
rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and
is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have
been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water
in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated un-
derneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the
sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this advan-
tage, When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off
the snow ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or trans-
parent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though
thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created
by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles them-
selves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice
beneath.

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a
pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking,
the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the
deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every
evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The

WALDEN 26 ^

day IS an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the
morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is
the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a
change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold
night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint’s Pond to
spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck
the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for
many rods around, or as if I had struck or a tight drum-head.
The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when
it felt the influence of the sun’s rays slanted upon it from
over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking
man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept
up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and
boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing
his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires
its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the
day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it
had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and
muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it.
The fishermen say that the ‘‘thundering of the pond” scares
the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder
every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its
thundering ; but though I may perceive no difference in the
weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold
and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its
law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as
the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and cov-
ered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmos-
pheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I
should have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come
in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed,
and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and
warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have
grown sensibly longer ; and I see how I shall get through the
winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no

270 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring,
to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped
squirrel’s chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted,
or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On
the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song spar-
row, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the
weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the
water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though
it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the
shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated
with water, so that you could put your foot through it when
six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after
a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disap-
peared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I
went across the middle only five days before it disappeared
entirely. In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the
1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of
April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in
’53, the 23d of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April.

Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers
and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly in-
teresting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When
the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear
the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artil-
lery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within
a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out
of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has
been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise
in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the
stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her
keel, — ^who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire
more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah,
— told me — and I was surprised to hear him express wonder
at any of Nature’s operations, for I thought that there were
no secrets between them — ^that one spring day he took his gun
and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with

WALDEN 271

the ducks. There was ice still on the meadows, but it was all
gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruc-
tion from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond,
which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part
with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was
surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing
any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an
island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes
on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for three
or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm
sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love,
within, and he thought it likely that some would be along
pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an hour he
heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly
grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard,
gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a uni-
versal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which
seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of
fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started
up in haste and excited ; but he found, to his surprise, that
the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and
drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made
by its edge grating on the shore, — at first gently nibbled and
crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its
wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it
came to a standstill.

At length the sun’s rays have attained the right angle, and
warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks,
and the sun, dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered land-
scape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which
the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the
music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are
filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off.

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the
forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down
the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed

272 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common
on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed
banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied
since railroads were invented. The material was sand of
every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly
mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the
spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand be-
gins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out
through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be
seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace
one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which
obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vege-
tation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines,
making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and
resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed,
and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded
of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs
or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque
vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze,
a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than
acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; des-
tined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle
to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were
a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various
shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, em-
bracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and
reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot
of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate
streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually be-
coming more flat and broad, running together as they are
more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously
and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the
original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself,
they are converted into banks, like those formed off the
mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the
ripple-marks on the bottom.

WALDEN 273

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high,
is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or
sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides,
the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage
remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When
I see on the one side the inert bank, — for the sun acts on one
side first, — and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the crea-
tion of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood
in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, —
had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank,
and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.
I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this
sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the
vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands ari
anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth
expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the
idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and
are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its proto-
type. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is
a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver
and lungs and the leaves of fat (yetySo), labor, lapsus, to flow
or slip downward, a lapsing; Xofiog, globus, lobe, globe; also
lap, flap, and many other words) ; externally, a dry thin leaf,
even as the / and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of
lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-
lobed), with the liquid I behind it pressing it forward. In
globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of
the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and
thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in
the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe
continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes
winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal
leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of
water-plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole
tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves

274 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are
the ova of insects in their axils.

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in
the morning the streams will start once more and branch and
branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance
how blood-vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe
that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream
of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the
finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at
last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the
most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the
most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms
for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which
is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one
stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and
anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly
yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the
best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its
channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter
which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in
the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cel-
lular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The
ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers
and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the
body. Who knows what the human body would expand and
flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand
a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may
be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of
the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip — labium^ from labor
(?) — ^laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth.
The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin
is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The
cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face,
opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe
of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop,
larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as

WALDEN 275

many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flpw,
and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it
to flow yet farther.

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle
of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but
patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hiero-
glyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This
phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance
and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementi-
tious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver,
lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side out-
ward ; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels,
and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost com-
ing out of the ground ; this is Spring. It precedes the green and
flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know
of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions.
It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes,
and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls
spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.
These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a
furnace, showing that Nature is ^Mn full blasF^ within. The
earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon
stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists
and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a
tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but
a living earth; compared with whose great central life all
animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will
heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals
and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they
will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth
flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it
are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and
plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground
like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea
with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with

276 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his

hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces.

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few
warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to
compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping
forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which
had withstood the winter, — ^life-everlasting, goldenrods, pin-
weeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interest-
ing frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not
ripe till then ; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort,
hardback, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed plants,
those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest
birds, — decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears.
I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf -like top
of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter
memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy,
and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation
to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It
is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of
the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible
tenderness and fragile delicacv. We are accustomed to hear
this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with
the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my
house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading
or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirrup-
ing and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were
beard ; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder,
as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying
humanity to stop them. No, you don’t — chickaree — chickaree.
They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive
their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was ir-
resistible.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with
younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard
over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the

WALDEN 271

song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter
tinkled as they fell ! What at such a time are histories, chronol-
ogies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing
carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low
over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that
awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all
dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass
flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire, — “et primitus ori-
tur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,’^ — as if the earth sent
forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun ; not yellow
but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual
youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from
the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but
anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with
the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out
of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the grow-
ing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are
their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this
perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it be-
times their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to
its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide
along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the
east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the
main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on
the shore, — olit, olit, olii, — chip, chip, chip, che char, — che
whs, whs, whs. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome
the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering
somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is un-
usually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and
all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides
eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the
living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of
water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of
glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and
of the sands on its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales

278 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the con-
trast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive
again.. Bfit this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have
paid.

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild
weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic
ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is
seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light
filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the
clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping
with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where
yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond
already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflect-
ing a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was
visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote
horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard
for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall
not forget for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and
powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of
a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he
sits upon! I mean he] I mean the twig. This at least is not
the Turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and shrub oaks about
my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their
several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect
and Jive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain.
I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by look-
ing at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile,
whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was
startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods,
like weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes, and
indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual con-
solation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their
wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied
my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the
pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first
spring night in the woods*

WALDEN 279

In the morning I watched the geese from the door through
the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so
large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial
pond for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore
they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the
signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank
circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then
steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the
leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier
pools. A “plump’’ of ducks rose at the same time and took the
route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.

For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some
solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion,
and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life
than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again
flying express in small flocks, and in due time I heard the
martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed
that the township contained so many that it could afford me
any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient
race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost
all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors
and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glanc-
ing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to
correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the
equilibrium of nature.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming
in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and
the realization of the Golden Age. —

“Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,
Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis.”

“The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathsean
kingdom,

280 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning
rays.

Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,

The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed ;
Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven.’’

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass
which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls
on it ; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of
past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in
winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning
all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While
such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the in-
nocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neigh-
bor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and
merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world;
but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning,
re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work,
and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with
still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with
the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten.
There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but
even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and
ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short
hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see
some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled
rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the young-
est plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why
the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, — why the
judge does not dismiss his case, — ^why the preacher does not

WALDEN 281

dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the
hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he
freely offers to all.

return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil
and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect
to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches
a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest
which has been felled. In like manner the evil which one
does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues
which began to spring up again from developing themselves
and destroys them.

“After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many
times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath
of evening does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the
breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them,
then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the
brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of the
brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of
reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man?”

“The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words
read

On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear
The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world.

And mortals know no shores but their own.

There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed.”

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the
river near the Nme-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the
quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk,

282 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the
sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up,
I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk,
alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two
over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which
gleamed like satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside
of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what
nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The
merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its
name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It
did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger
hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air;
mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated
its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite,
and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never
set its foot on ttrra firma. It appeared to have no companion
in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and to need none
but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was
not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where
was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father
in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to
the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a
crag; — or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud,
woven of the rainbow^s trimmings and the sunset sky, and
lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth?
Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.

Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and
bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels.
Ahl I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning
of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to
hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild
river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright
a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slum-
bering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no
stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such

WALDEN 283

a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was
thy victory, then?

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the un-
explored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the
tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where
the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming
of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some
wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink
crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that
we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that
all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be
infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because un-
fathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be
refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic
features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with
its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the
rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need
to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pas-
turing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when
we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which dis-
gusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength
from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the
path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go
out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy^
but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and in-
violable health of Nature was my compensation for this.
I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can
be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one
another; that tender organizations can be so serenely
squashed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons
gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and
that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the lia-
bility to accident, we must see how little account is to be made
of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal
innocence. Poison is not p)oisonou5 after all, nor are any
wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must

284 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereot 3 ^ed.

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees,
just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, im-
parted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially
in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and
shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. On the third
or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the
first week of the month I heard the whip-poor-will, the brown
thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other
birds. I had heard the wood thrush long before. The phoebe
had already come once more and looked in at my door and
window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her,
sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as
if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The
sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and
the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could
have collected a barrelful. This is the ^^sulphur showers^’ we
hear of. Even in Calidas’ drama of Sacontala, we read of “rills
dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus.’’ And so the
seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into
higher and higher grass.

Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and
the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden Septem*
ber 6th, 1847.

CONCLUSION

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air
and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The
buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird
is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite
than we ; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the
Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.
Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons,
cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and
sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think
that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on
our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates
decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot
go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the
land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than
our views of it.

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors
picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of
our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing,
and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One
hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe ; but surely that
is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a
man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also
may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to
shoot one’s self. —

‘‘Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
285

2S6 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.^’

What does Africa, — ^what does the West stand for? Is not oui
own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove,
like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile,
or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage
around this continent, that we would find? Are these the prob-
lems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man
who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does
Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo
Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams
and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, — ^with ship-
loads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary;
and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved
meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus
to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord
of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but
a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be pa-
triotic who have no 5e//-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the
less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no
sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.
Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning
of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade
and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there
are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man
is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is
easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and
cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and
boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the
Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone. —

^‘Erret, et extremes alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae.”

WALDEN 287

Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.

It is not woi th the while to go round the world to count the
cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and
you may perhaps find some ‘^Symmes’ Hole’^ by which to get
at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal,
Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but
no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though
it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn
to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,
if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized
in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against
a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that
run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor
conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct,
a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night,
sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery ‘‘to ascer-
tain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place
one’s self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of so-
ciety.” He declared that “a soldier who fights in the ranks
does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad,” — “that
honor and religion have never stood in the way of a welL
considered and a firm resolve.” This was manly, as the world
goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would
have found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to
what are deemed “the most sacred laws of society,” through
obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his
resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to
put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience

288 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition
to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps
it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could
not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how
easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and
make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a
week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-
side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is
still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have
fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of
the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men ; and so
with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty,
then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts
of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin
passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of
the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the
mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one
advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and en-
deavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet
with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some
things behind, will pass an invisible boundary ; new, universal,
and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves
around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will
live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion
as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear
less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty
poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in
the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should
be. Now put the foundations under them.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America
make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you.
Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important,
and there were not enough to understand you without them.

WALDEN 289

As if Nature could support but one order of understandings,
could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well
as creeping things, and hush and whoa^ which Bright can
understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in
stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be
extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the
narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to
the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagancel it
depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which
seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like
the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence,
and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak
somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment,
to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that 1
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a
true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared
then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In
view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and
undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side;
as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the
sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray
the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is in-
stantly translated] its literal monument alone remains. The
words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet
they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and
praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the
sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Some-
times we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-
witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a
third part of their wit. Some would find fgalt with the morn-
ing red, if they ever got up early enough. “They pretend,^'
as I hear, “that the verses of Kabir have four different senses;
illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exotoric doctrine of the
Vedas ; ” but in this part of the world it f s considered a ground

290 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one
interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-
rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails
,*50 much more widely and fatally?

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I
should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my
pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice.
Southern customeis objected to its blue color, which is the
evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the
Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity
men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not
like the azure ether beyond.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and
moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the
ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to
the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a
man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of
pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every
one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was
made.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and
in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a differ-
ent drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, how-
ever measured or far away. It is not important that he should
mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his
spring into summer? If the condition of things which wc were
made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can sub-
stitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall
we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves,
though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the
true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed
to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to
make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work
time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not

WALDEN 25^1

enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects,
though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded
instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should
not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for
and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted
him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he gre\V
not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolu-'
tion, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowl-
edge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with
Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance
because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a
stick in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary
ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before
he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars
was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the
name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his
work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff
Kalpa was no longer the pole-star ; and ere he had put on the
ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma
had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to
mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to
his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the as-
tonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma.
He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with
full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and
dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had
taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings
still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former
lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had
elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the
brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal
brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure ; how could
the result be other than wonderful?

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so weB
at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part,
we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an

292 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves
Into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it
is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only
the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what
you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde,
the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had any-
thing to say, ^^Tell the tailors,^^ said he, ^^to remember to make
a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.’^ His
companion’s prayer is forgotten.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it ; do not shun
it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. The faultfinder will find faults
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps
have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-
house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the
almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow
melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but
a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as
cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town’s poor seem to me
often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they
are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most
think that they are above being supported by the town; but
it oftener happens that they are not above supporting them-
selves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.
Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we
change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will
see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a
corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would
be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The
philosopher said: “From an army of three divisions one can
take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man
the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.”
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself
to many influences to be played on ; it is all dissipation. Humil-

WALDEN 295

ity like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of
poverty and meanness gather around us, ^^and lo! creation
widens to our view.’’ We are often reminded that if there
were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must
still be the same, and our means essentially the same. More-
over, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you
cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but
confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you
are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most
sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is
sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses
ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous
wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to
buy one necessary of the soul.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition
was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of
my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum
from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neigh-
bors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and
ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I
am no more interested in such things than in the contents of
the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about
costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still,
dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of

England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or

of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I
am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke
bey. I delight to come to my bearings, — not walk in procession
with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk
even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live
in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century,
but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men
celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements,
and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the
president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh,
to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and

294 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
rightfully attracts me; — not hang by the beam of the scale
and try to weigh less, — not suppose a case, but take the case
that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no
power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence
to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us
not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom every-
where. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp
before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths,
and he observed to the boy, thought you said that this bog
had a hard bottom.” ^^So it has,” answered the latter, ^‘but
you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and
quicksands of society ; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only
what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is
good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a
nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep
me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the
furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and
clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and
think of your work with satisfaction, — a work at which you
would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you
God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another
rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I
sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance,
and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not;
and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The
hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no
need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of
the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an
older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage,
which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the
house and grounds and “entertainment” pass for nothing with
me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and
^^onducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There
^as a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree.

WALDEN 295

His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had
I called on him.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and
musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As
if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a
man to noe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth
to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness
aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant self-
complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to
congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line ; and
in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its
long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and
literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the
Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men\
It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. “Yes, we
have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall
never die,” — that is, as long as we can remember them. The
learned societies and great men of Assyria, — where are they?
What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are!
There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole
human life. These may be but the spring months in the life
of the race. If we have had the seven-years’ itch, we have not
seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are ac-
quainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live.
Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped
as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are
sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves
wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we
are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor,
and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask my-
self why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its
head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and
impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded
of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over
me the human insect.

296 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world and
yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what
kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened
countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they
are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang,
while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we
can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire
is very large and respectable, and that the United States are
a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls
behind every man which can float the British Empire like a
chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what
sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground?
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like
that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched
uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will
drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where
we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently
washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one
has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New Eng-
land, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the
dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood
in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and
afterward in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the
living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting
the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for
several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who
does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality
strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under
many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of
society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and
living tree, which has been gradually converted into the
semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — ^heard perchance gnaw-
ing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they

WALDEM 29T

sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth
from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture,
to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but
such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of
time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our
eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are
awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning
star.

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD
AND MERRIMACK RIVERS

{In 1839, two years after he had graduated from col-
lege, Thoreau and his brother made a river voyage in
a boat they had built with their own hands. That
voyage was the basis for Thoreau* s first book, which
he published at his own expense in 1849, Of the
1000 copies published, about 215 were sold, seventy-
five given away and the rest stored in Thoreau* s
chamber. It took him several years to repay the debt
he had incurred in his first book venture. Copies of
that first edition are now worth about ^75,00 each,.
The following pages are selections from the long
work,]

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD
AND MERRIMACK RIVERS

CONCORD RIVER

‘■‘Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,

Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburics,

Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees,

Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.’*

— Emerson.

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably
as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place
in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and
its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it re-
ceived the other but kindred name of Concord from the first
plantation on its banks, which appears to have been com-
menced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-
ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it
will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on
its banks. To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they
hunted and fished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to
Concord farmers, who own the Great Meadows, and get the
hay from year to year. “One branch of it,” according to the
Historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good authority,
“rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another from a
pond and a large cedar swamp in Westborough,” and flowing
between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham,
and between Sudbury and Wayland, where it is sometimes
called Sudbury River, it enters Concord at the south part of

301

302 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAG
the town, and after receiving the North or Assabeth River,
which has its source a little further to the north and west,
goes out at the northeast angle, and flowing between Bedford,
and Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Mer-
rimack Li Lowell. In Concord it is, in summer, from four to
fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to three hundred feet
wide, but in the spring freshets, when it overflows its banks,
it is in some places nearly a mile wide. Between Sudbury and
Wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and
when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of
shallow vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks.
Just above Sherman’s Bridge, between these towns, is the
largest expanse, and when the wind blows freshly in a raw
March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows
or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder
swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller Lake
Huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to
row or sail over. The farm-houses along the Sudbury shore,
which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine
water prospects at this season. The shore is more flat on the
Wayland side, and this town is the greatest loser by the flood.
Its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now,
since the dams have been erected, where they remember to
have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and
they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is
nothing but bluejoint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing
in water all the year round. For a long time, they made the
most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes
till nine o’clock at night, sedulously paring with their scythes
in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice; but now
it is not worth the getting, when they can come at it, and they
look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last
resource.

It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you
go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country
there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 303
and farm-houses, and barns, and hay-stacks, you never saw
before, and men everywhere; Sudbury, that is Southborough
men, and Wayland, and Nine- Acre-Corner men, and Bound
Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln,
Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated
by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your
face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all un-
easy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now
going off with a clatter and a whistling, like riggers straight
for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings,
or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly
moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave
these parts ; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for
dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you
know of; their labored homes rising here and there like hay-
stacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice
along the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves
and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating
about among the alders; — such healthy natural tumult as
proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stand all
around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of
glee and sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside.
You shall perhaps run aground on Cranberry Island, only
some spires of last yearns pipegrass above water, to show
where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as
an5rwhere on the North-west Coast. I never voyaged so
far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of
before, whose names you don^t know, going away down
through the meadows with long ducking guns, with water-
tight boots, wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on
bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half cock; and
they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged shelldrakes,
whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other w’ld and
noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlors never
dream of. You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and
wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s

304 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and
rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut
is of meat; who were out not only in 1775 and 1812, but have
been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer,
or Chaucer, or Shakspeare, only they never got time to say
so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their
fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should
put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face
of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching,
and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and
out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what
they had already written for want of parchment.

As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of
to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-
experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably
future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine^
in the wind and rain which never die.

The resectable folks, —

Where dwell they? -
They whisper in the oaks.

And they sigh in the hay;

Summer and winter, night and day.

Out on the meadow, there dwell they.

They never die.

Nor snivel, nor cry,

Nor ask our pity
With a wet eye.

A sound estate they ever mend,

To every asker readily lend;

To the ocean wealth,

To the meadow health,

To Time his length.

To the rocks strength,

To the stars light.

To the weary night,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 305
To the busy day,

To the idle play;

And so their good cheer never ends,

For all are their debtors, and all their friends.

Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its cur-
rent, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred
to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants
of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later
occasions. It has been proposed that the town should adopt
for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling
nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth
of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river
has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. The story
is current, at any rate, though I believe that strict history
will not bear it out, that the only bridge ever carried away
on the main branch, within the limits of the town, was driven
up stream by the wind. But wherever it makes a sudden
bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called
a river. Compared with the other tributaries of the Merri-
mack, it appears to have been properly named Musketaquid,
or Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most part, it
creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks,
where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the
ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows
borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater
distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other
fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape vine, which bears
fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes.
Still further from the stream, on the edge of the firm land, are
seen the gray and white dwellings of the inhabitants. Accord-
ing to the valuation of 183 1, there were in Concord two thou-
sand one hundred and eleven acres, or about one-seventh of
the whole territory, in meadow; this standing next in the list
after pasturage and unimproved lands; and, judging from the

306 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
returns of previous years, the meadow is not reclaimed so fast
as the woods are cleared.

The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows steals thus
unobserved through the town, without a murmur or a pulse-
beat, its general course from south* west to north-east, and its
length about fifty miles; a huge volume of matter, cease-
lessly rolling through the plains and valleys of the substantial
earth, with the moccasined tread of an Indian warrior, mak-
ing haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient reser-
voir. The murmurs of many a famous river on the other
side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant
dwellers on its banks; many a poet^s stream floating the
helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. The Xanthus or
Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain
torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame; —

‘‘And thou Simois, that as an arrowe, clere
Through Troy rennest, aie downward to the sea ; ” —

and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but
much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.

“Sure there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon ; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.’’

The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile, those journeying
atoms from the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Moun-
tains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the
annals of the world. The heavens are not yet drained over their
sources, but the Mountains of the Moon still send their annual
tribute to the Pasha without fail, as they did to the Pharaohs,
though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point of
the sword. Rivers must have been the guides which conducted
the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lurCj

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 307
when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adyen^
ture, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks
will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the
globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.
They are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling
the ground, and removing obstacles from the path of the
traveller, quenching his thirst, and bearing him on their
bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting
scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and wher.
the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest per-
fection.

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the
lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the
same law with the system, with time, and all that is made;
the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream,
shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had
sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise; the shining
pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips
and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees, that floated
past, fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to
me, and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and
float whither it would bear me.

SATURDAY

“Come, come, my lovely fair, and let us try
These rural delicates.”

— Invitation to the Soul, Quarles

At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we
two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this
river port; for Concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of
entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men ;
one shore at least exempted from all duties but such as an
honest man will gladly discharge. A warm drizzling rain had

308 THF WRITINGS OF THOREAU
obscured the morning, and threatened to delay our voyage,
but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out
a mild afternoon, as serene and fresh as if nature were matur-
ing some greater scheme of her own. After this long dripping
and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more
healthily than ever. So with a vigorous shove we launched
our boat from the bank, while the flags and bulrushes curt-
seyed a God-speed, and dropped silently down the stream.

Our boat, which had cost us a week’s labor in the spring,
was in form like a fisherman’s dory, fifteen feet long by three
and a half in breadth at the widest part, painted green below,
with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in
which it was to spend its existence. It had been loaded the
evening before at our door, half a mile from the river, with
potatoes and melons from a patch which we had cultivated,
and a few utensils, and was provided with wheels in order to
be rolled around falls, as well as with two sets of oars, and
several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also
two masts, one of which served for a tent-pole at night; for
a buffalo skin was to be our bed, and a tent of cotton cloth our
roof. It was strongly built but heavy, and hardly of better
model than usual. If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of
amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one
half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the
other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. The fish shows
where there should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth
in the hold ; its fins direct where to set the oars, and the tail
gives some hint for the form and position of the rudder. The
bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to
give to the prow that it may balance the boat and divide the
air and water best. These hints we had but partially obeyed.
But the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satis-
fied with any model, however fashionable, which does not
answer all the requisitions of art. However, as art is all of a
ship but the wood, and yet the wood alone will rudely serve
the purpose of a ship, boat being of wood gladly availed

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 309
itself of the old law that the heavier shall float the lighter, and
though a dull water fowl, proved a sufficient buoy for our
purpose.

‘Were it the will of Heaven, an osier bough
Were vessel safe enough the seas to plow.’’

Some village friends stood upon a promontory lower down
the stream to wave us a last farewell; but we, having already
performed these shore rites with excusable reserve, as befits
those who are embarked on unusual enterprises, who behold
but speak not, silently glided past the firm lands of Concord,
both peopled cape and lonely summer meadow, with steady
sweeps. And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns
speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and
thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may
be many russet-clad children lurking in those broad mead-
ows, with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though
wholly concealed by brakes and hardback and meadow-sweet,
heard our salute that afternoon.

We were soon floating past the first regular battle ground
of the Revolution, resting on our oars between the still visible
abutments of that “North Bridge,” over which in April, 177S,
rolled the first faint tide of that war, which ceased not, till, as
we read on the stone on our right, it “gave peace to these
United States.” As a Concord poet has sung, —

“By the rude bridge that arched the flood.

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled.

Here once the embattled farmers stood.

And fired the shot heard round the world.

“The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.”

310 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Our reflections had already acquired a historical remote-
ness from the scenes we had left, and we ourselves essayed to
sing.

Ah, ’t is in vain the peaceful din
That wakes the ignoble town,

Not thus did braver spirits win
A patriot’s renown.

There is one field beside this stream.
Wherein no foot does fall,

But yet it beareth in my dream
A richer crop than all.

Let me believe a dream so dear,

Some heart beat high that day,

Above the petty Province here,

And Britain far away:

Some hero of the ancient mould,

Some aim of knightly worth.

Of strength unbought, and faith unsold,
Honored this spot of earth ;

Who sought the prize his heart described,
And did not ask release,

Whose free born valor was not bribed
By prospect of a peace.

The men who stood on yonder height
That day are long since gone ;

Not the same hand directs the fight
And monumental stone.

Ye were the Grecian cities then.
The Romes of modern birth.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 311
Where the New England husbandmen
Have shown a Roman worth.

In vain I search a foreign land,

To find our Bunker Hill,

And Lexington and Concord stand
By no Laconian rill.

With such thoughts we swept gently by this now peaceful
pasture ground, on waves of Concord, in which was long
since drowned the din of war.

But since we sailed
Some things have failed.

And many a dream
Gone down the stream.

Here then an aged shepherd dwelt.

Who to his flock his substance dealt.

And ruled them with a vigorous crook.

By precept of the sacred Book;

But he the pierless bridge passed o’er.

And solitary left the shore.

Anon a youthful pastor came.

Whose crook was not unknown to fame,

His lambs he viewed with gentle glance,

Spread o’er the country’s wide expanse.

And fed with “Mosses from the Manse.”

Here was our Hawthorne in the dale.

And here the shepherd told his tale.

That slight shaft had now sunk behind the hills, and we had
floated round the neighboring bend, and under the new North
Bridge between Ponkawtasset and the Poplar Hill, into the

312 THE WRITIKGS OF THOREAU
Great Meadows, which, like a broad moccasin print, have
levelled a fertile and juicy place in nature.

On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,

Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,

A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord’s twilight day.

Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by.

Most travellers cannot at first descry,

But eyes that wont to range the evening sky.

And know celestial lights, do plainly see,

And gladly hail them, numbering two or three ;

For lore that’s deep must deeply studied be.

As from deep wells men read star-poetry.

These stars are never pal’d, though out of sight.

But like the sun they shine forever bright ;

Aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight
Put out its eyes that it may see their light.

Who would neglect the least celestial sound.

Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground.

If he could know it one day would be found
That star in Cygnus whither we are bound,

And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?

Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to
be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating
from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morn-
ing or evening thoughts. We glided noiselessly down the
stream, occasionally driving a pickerel from the covert of
the pads, or a bream from her nest, and the smaller bittern
now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 313
in the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass
at our approach, and carried its precious legs away to deposit
them in a place of safety. The tortoises also rapidly dropped
into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the wil-
lows, breaking the reflections of the trees. The banks had
passed the height of their beauty, and some of the brighter
flowers showed by their faded tints that the season was verg-
ing towards the afternoon of the year ; but this sombre tinge
enhanced their sincerity, and in the still unabated heats they
seemed like a mossy brink of some cool well. The narrow-
leaved willow lay along the surface of the water in masses of
light green foliage, interspersed with the large white balls of
the button-bush. The rose-colored polygonum raised its head
proudly above the water on either hand, and, flowering at
this season, and in these localities, in the midst of dense fields
of the white species which skirted the sides of the stream, its
little streak of red looked very rare and precious. The pure
white blossoms of the arrowhead stood in the shallower parts,
and a few cardinals on the margin still proudly surveyed them-
selves reflected in the water, though the latter, as well as the
pickerel-weed, was now nearly out of blossom. The snake-
head, chelone glabra, grew close to the shore, while a kind of
coreopsis, turning its brazen face to the sun, full and rank,
and a tall dull red flower, eupatorium purpureum, or trumpet
weed, formed the rear rank of the fluvial array. The bright
blue flowers of the soap-wort gentian were sprinkled here and
there in the adjacent meadows, like flowers which Proserpine
had dropped, and still further in the fields, or higher on the
bank, were seen the Virginian rhexia, and drooping neottia
or ladies’-tresses; while from the more distant waysides,
which we occasionally passed, and banks where the sun had
lodged, was reflected a dull yellow beam from the ranks of
tansy, now in its prime. In short, nature seemed to have
adorned herself for our departure with a profusion of fringes
and curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, reflected
in the water. But we missed the white water-Jily^ which is

314 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the queen of river flowers, its reign being over for this season.
He makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a true water clock
who delays so long. Many of this species inhabit our Con-
cord water. I have passed down the river before sunrise on a
summer morning between fields- of lilies still shut in sleep;
and when at length the flakes of sunlight from over the bank
fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms
seemed to flash open before me, as I floated along, like the
unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence
of the sun’s rays.

As we were floating through the last of these familiar mead-
ows, we observed the large and conspicuous flowers of the
hibiscus, covering the dwarf willows, and mingled with the
leaves of the grape, and wished that we could inform one of
our friends behind of the locality of this somewhat rare and
inaccessible flower before it was too late to pluck it; but we
were just gliding out of sight of the village spire before it
occurred to us that the farmer in the adjacent meadow would
go to church on the morrow, and would carry this news for us;
and so by the Monday, while we should be floating on the
Merrimack, our friend would be reaching to plock this blos-
som on the bank of'the Concord.

After a pause at Ball’s Hill, the St. Ann’s of Concord
voyageurs, not to say any prayer for the success of our^
voyage, but to gather the few berries which were still left on
the hills, hanging by very slender threads, we weighed anchor
again, and were soon out of sight of our native village. The
land seemed to grow fairer as we withdrew from it. Far away
to the south-west lay the quiet village, left alone under its
elms and button-woods in mid afternoon; and the hills, not-
withstanding their blue, ethereal faces, seemed to cast a
saddened eye on their old playfellows; but, turning short to
the north, we bade adieu to their familiar outlines, and ad-
dressed ourselves to new scenes and adventures. Nought was
familiar but the heavens, from under whose roof the voyageur
'aever passes; but with their countenance, and the acquaint-

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 3U
ance we had with river and wood, we trusted to fare well under
any circumstances.

From this point, the river runs perfectly straight for a mile
or more to Carlisle Bridge, which consists of twenty wooden
piers, and when we looked back over it, its surface was re-
duced to a line’s breadth, and appeared like a cobweb gleaming
in the sun. Here and there might be seen a pole sticking up,
to mark the place where some fisherman had enjoyed unusual
luck, and in return had consecrated his rod to the deities who
preside over these shallows. It was full twice as broad as be-
fore, deep and tranquil, with a muddy bottom, and bordered
with willows, beyond which spread broad lagoons covered with
pads, bulrushes, and flags.

Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing
with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at
his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars,
and drive away luck for a season ; and when we had rowed
a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned towards
him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil
surface, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues
under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve
the eye in the extended meadow; and there would he stand
abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields
at evening with his fish. Thus, by one bait or another. Nature
allures inhabitants into all her recesses. This man was the
last of our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through
him bade adieu to our friends.

The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races
of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood.
The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inherit-
ance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to
an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not
confounded by many knowledges, and has not. sought out
many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the

316 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that
is invention enough for him. It is good even to be a fisherman
in summer and in winter. Some men are judges these August
days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises; they sit
judging there honorably, between the seasons and between
meals, leading a civil politic life, arbitrating in the case of
Spaulding versus Cummings, it may be, from highest noon
till the red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman, mean-
while, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer's
sun, arbitrating in other cases between muckworm and shiner,
amid the fragrance of water-lilies, mint, and pontederia, lead-
ing his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole's length
of where the larger fishes swim. Human life is to him very
much like a river,

— ^henning aie downward to the sea."

This was his observation. His honor made a great discovery in
bailments.

I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the
Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle,
England, with his son, the latter a stout and hearty man who
had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was
who took his way in silence through the meadows, having
passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old
experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the
yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight,
if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at
length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads
and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old coun-
try method, — for youth and age then went a-fishing together,
— full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own
Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in
serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with
the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, en-
trapping silly fish, almost grown to be the sun's familiar ; what

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 317
need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his
time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how
his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet
I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I
have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged
thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed
house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him ;
nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and
migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor
solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament
and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their
Bibles.

Whether we live by the sea-side, or by the lakes and rivers,
or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of
fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain
localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature
universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually
coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting
to the student of nature as the more fertile law itself, which
deposits their spawn on the tops of mountains, and on the
interior plains; the fish principle in nature, from which it
results that they may be found in water in so many places,
in greater or less numbers. The natural historian is not a
fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely,
but as fishing has been styled ^^a contemplative man’s recrea-
tion,” introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the
fruit of the naturalist’s observations is not in new genera or
species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only
a more contemplative man’s recreation. The seeds of the life
of fishes are everywhere disseminated, whether the winds waft
them, or the waters float them, or the deep earth holds them ;
wherever a pond is dug, straightway it is stocked with this vi-
vacious race. They have a lease of nature, and it is not yet out.
The Chinese are bribed to carry their ova from province to
province in jars or in hollow reeds, or the water-birds to
transport them to the mountain tarns and interior lakes.

318 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
There are fishes wherever there is a fluid medium, and even
in clouds and in melted metals we detect their semblance.
Think how in winter you can sink a line down straight in a
pasture through snow and through ice, and pull up a bright,
slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish! It is curi-
ous, also, to reflect how they make one family, from the largest
wO the smallest. The least minnow, that lies on the ice as bait
for pickerel, looks like a huge seafish cast up on the shore. In
the waters of this town there are about a dozen distinct species,
though the inexperienced would expect many more.

That was a long pull from Ball’s Hill to Carlisle Bridge,
sitting with our faces to the south, a slight breeze rising from
the north; but nevertheless water still runs and grass grows,
for now, having passed the bridge between Carlisle and Bed-
ford, we see men haying far off in the meadow, their heads
waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the
wind seemed to bend all alike. As the night stole over, such
a freshness was wafted across the meadow that every blade of
cut-grass seemed to teem with life. Faint purple clouds began
to be reflected in the water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder
along the banks, while, like sly water rats, we stole along
nearer the shore, looking for a place to pitch our camp.

At length, when we had made about seven miles, as far as
Billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a little rising
ground which in the spring forms an island in the river. Here
we found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes, where
they seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use.
Bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled in river water, made our
repast, and as we had drank in the fluvial prospect all day,
so now we took a draught of the water with our evening meal
to propitiate the rive: gods, and whet our vision for the sights
it was to behold. The sun was setting on the one hand, while
our eminence was contributing its shadow to the night, on the
other. It seemed insensibly to grow lighter as the night shut

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 319
in, and a distant and solitary farm-house was revealed, which
before lurked in the shadows of the noon. There was no other
house in sight, nor any cultivated field. To the right and leftj
as far as the horizon, were straggling pine woods with their
plumes against the sky, and across the river were rugged hills,
covered with shrub oaks, tangled with grape vines and ivy,
with here and there a gray rock jutting out from the maze.
The sides of these cliffs, though a quarter of a mile distant,
were almost heard to rustle*while we looked at them, it was
such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and
where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted
over the water, and fireflies husbanded their light under the
grass and leaves against the night. When we had pitched our
tents on the hill-side, a few rods from the shore, we sat looking
through its triangular door in the twilight at our lonely mast
on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come
to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream ; the first en-
croachment of commerce on this land. There was our port,
our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water
and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and
what of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized.

For the most part, there was no recognition of human life
in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the breath-
ing of the wind. As we sat up, kept awake by the novelty
of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about
over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass close to
our tent, and once a musquash fumbling among the potatoes
and melons in our boat, but when we hastened to the shore
we could detect only a ripple in the water ruffling the disk of
a star. At intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dream-
ing sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl, but after each
sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night,
each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves,
there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious
silence, as if the intruder were aware that no life was right-
fully abroad at that hour. There was a fire in Lowell, as we

320 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
judged, this night, and we saw the horizon blazing, and heard
the distant alarm bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne
to these woods. But the most constant and memorable sound
of a summer’s night, which we did not fail to hear every night
afterward, though at no time so incessantly and so favorably
as now, was the barking of the house dogs, from the loudest
and hoarsest bark to the faintest aerial palpitation under the
eaves of heaven, from the patient but anxious mastiff to the
timid and wakeful terrier, at first loud and rapid, then faint
and slow, to be imitated only in a whisper; wow-wow-wow-
wow — ^wo — ^wo — w — ^w. Even in a retired and uninhabited
district like this, it was a sufficiency of sound for the ear of
night, and more impressive than any music. I have heard the
voice of a hound, just before daylight, while the stars were
shining, from over the woods and river, far in the horizon,
when it sounded as sweet and melodious as an instrument.
The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the
horizon, may have first suggested the notes of the hunting
horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. T his
natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient
world before the horn was invented. The very dogs that sul-
lenly bay the moon from farmyards in these nights, excite
more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or
war sermons of the age. “I had rather be a dog, and bay the
moon,” than many a Roman that I know. The night is equally
indebted to the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from
the very setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn.
All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and
the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature’s health
or sound state. Such is the never failing beauty and accuracy
of language, the most perfect art in the world ; the chisel of a
thousand years retouches it.

At length the antepenultimate and drowsy hours drew on,
and all sounds were denied entrance to our ears.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 321^
Who sleeps by day and walks by night,

Will meet no spirit but some sprite.

SUNDAY

*‘The river calmly flows,

Through shining banks, through lonely glen,

Where the owl shrieks, though ne^er the cheer of men
Has stirred its mute repose.

Still if you should walk there, you would go there again.”

— Channing

“The Indians tell us of a beautiful River lying far to the south, which
they call Merrimac.”

SiEUR DE Monts Relations of the Jesuits^ 1604.

In the morning the river and adjacent country were cov«
ered with a dense fog, through which the smoke of our firfe
curled up like a still subtiler mist; but before we had rowed
many rods, the sun arose and the fog rapidly dispersed, leav-
ing a slight steam only to curl along the surface of the water.
It was a quiet Sunday morning, with more of the auroral
rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it dated from
earlier than the fall of man, and still preserved a heathenish
integrity; —

An early unconverted Saint,

Free from noontide or evening taint,

Heathen without reproach,

That did upon the civil day encroach,

, And ever since its birth
Had trod the outskirts of the earth.

But the impressions which the morning makes vanish with
its dews, and not even the most ‘^persevering mortak^ can
preserve the memory of its freshness to mid-day. As we
passed the various islands, or what were islands in the spring,

322 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
rowing with our backs down stream, we gave names to them.
The one on which we had camped we called Fox Island, and
one fine densely wooded island surrounded by deep water
and overrun by grape vines, which looked like a mass of
verdure and of flowers cast upon'the waves, we named Grape
Island. From BalFs Hill to Billerica meeting-house, the river
was still twice as broad as in Concord, a deep, dark, and
dead stream, flowing between gentle hills and sometimes
cliffs, and well wooded all the way. It was a long woodland
lake bordered with willows. For long reaches we could see
neither house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the vicinity
of man. Now we coasted along some shallow shore by the
edge of a dense palisade of bulrushes, which straightly
bounded the water as if dipt by art, reminding us of the reed
forts of the East Indians, ot which we had read; and now
the bank slightly raised was overhung with graceful grasses
and various species of brake, whose downy stems stood
closely grouped and naked as in a vase, while their heads
spread several feet on either side. The dead limbs of the
willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing mikania,
mikania scandens, which filled every crevice in the leafy
bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its sup-
porter and the balls of the buttonbush. The water willow,
salix Purshiam, when it is of large size and entire, is the most
graceful and ethereal of our trees. Its masses of light green
foliage, piled one upon another to the height of twenty or
thirty feet, seemed to float on the surface of the water, while
the slight gray stems and the shore were hardly visible be-
tween them. No tree is so wedded to the water, and harmonizes
so well with still streams. It is even more graceful than the
weeping willow, or any pendulous trees, which dip their
branches in the stream instead of being buoyed up by it. Its
limbs curved outward over the surface as if attracted by it. It
had not a New England but an oriental character, reminding
us of trim Persian gardens, of Haroun Alraschid, and the arti-
ficial lakes of the east.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 323
As we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of
foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines,
the surface was so calm, and both air and water so trans-
parent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river
was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the
air above. The birds seemed to flit through submerged groves,
alighting on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come
up from below. We were uncertain whether the water floated
the land, or the land held the water in its bosom. It was such
a season, in short, as that in which one of our Concord poets
sailed on its stream, and sung its quiet glories.

‘‘There is an inward voice, that in the stream
Sends forth its spirit to the listening ear,

And in a calm content it floweth on.

Like wisdom, welcome with its own respect.

Clear in its breast lie all these beauteous thoughts,

It doth receive the green and graceful trees.

And the gray rocks smile in its peaceful arms, —

And more he sung, but too serious for our page. For every
oak and birch, too, growing on the hilltop, as well as for these
elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful, ethereal
and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes
Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes
it visible. The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as
if it were a natural Sabbath. The air was so elastic and crys^
talline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass
has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection.
The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which
the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new
regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with
lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely
distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over
fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holyday or
prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and thi

324 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into
a country maze, at the season when fruit trees are in blossom.

Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually
thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable back-
ground. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite,
be as impressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken
shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon. Char-
acter always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus
distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects, whether
things or persons. On this same stream a maiden once sailed
in my boat, thus unattended but by invisible guardians, and
as she sat in the prow there was nothing but herself between
the steersman and the sky. I could then say with the poet:—

“Sweet falls the summer air
Over her frame who sails with me;

Her way like that is beautifully free.

Her nature far more rare.

And is her constant heart of virgin purity.’^

At evening, still the very stars seem but this maiden^s emis-
saries and reporters of her progress.

Low in the eastern sky
Is set thy glancing eye;

And though its gracious light
Ne’er riseth to my sight.

Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
Of yonder hill,

Conveys thy gentle will.

Believe I knew thy thought.

And that the zephyrs brought
Thy kindest wishes through,

As mine they bear to you^

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 32S
That some attentive cloud
Did pause amid the crowd
Over my head,

While gentle things were said.

Believe the thrushes sung,

And that the flower bells rung.

That herbs exhaled their scent.

And beasts knew what was meant,

The trees a welcome waved,

And lakes their margins laved,

When thy free mind
To my retreat did wind.

It was a summer eve,

The air did gently heave,

While yet a low hung cloud
Thy eastern skies did shroud;

The lightning’s silent gleam,

Startling my drowsy dream,

Seemed like the flash
Under thy dark eyelash.

Still will I strive to be
As if thou wert with me;

Whatever path I take,

It shall be for thy sake.

Of gentle slope and wide.

As thou wert by my side,

Without a root
To trip thy gentle foot.

Ill walk with gentle pace,

And choose the smoothest place,

And careful dip the oar,

And shun the winding shore,

326 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
And gently steer my boat
Where water lilies float,

And cardinal flowers
Stand in their sylvan bowers.

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the
mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and
blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully in-
deed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate her-
self. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever
the trees and skies are reflected there is more than Atlantic
depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We noticed
that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free
and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky,
than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there mani-
fold visions in the direction of every object, and even the
most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some
men have their eyes naturally intended to the one, and some
to the other object.

^^A man that looks on glass.

On it may stay his eye.

Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And the heavens espy.”

Two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, floating
buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in
mid air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the
water without turning over, seemed still in their element,
and to have very delicately availed themselves of the natural
laws. Their floating there was a beautiful and successful
experiment in natural philosophy, and it served to ennoble
in our eyes the art of navigation, for as birds fly and fishes
swim, so these men sailed. It reminded us how much fairer
and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that our life

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 321
in its whole economy might be as beautiful as the fairest
works of art or nature.

The sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, and glanced from
every pad ; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the
delicious light and air; the meadows were a-drinking at
their leisure ; the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath thoughts,
summing up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun,
and one toe upon a reed, eyeing the wondrous universe in
which they act their part; the fishes swam more staid and
soberly, as maidens go to church; shoals of golden and silver
minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then
sheered off into more sombre aisles; they swept by as if
moved by one mind, continually gliding past each other, and
yet preserving the form of their battalion unchanged, as if
they were still embraced by the transparent membrane which
held the spawn; a young band of brethren and sisters, trying
their new fins; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when
we drove them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously
tacked and passed underneath the boat. Over the old wooden
bridges no traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the
fishes avoided to glide between the abutments.

Here was a village not far off behind the woods, Billerica,
settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of
the first settlers in this late ^'howling wilderness;” yet to all
intents and purposes it is as old as Fernay or as Mantua,
an old gray town, where men grow old and sleep already under
moss-grown monuments, — outgrow their usefulness. This is
ancient Billerica (Villarica?), now in its dotage. I never
heard that it was young. See, is not Nature here gone to decay,
farms all run out, meeting-house grown gray and racked with
age? If you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray
rocks in the pasture. It has a bell that sounds sometimes as
far as Concord woods; I have heard that, aye, — ^hear it now.
No wonder that such a sound startled the dreaming Indian,
and frightened his game, when the first bells were swung on
trees, and sounded through the forest beyond the plantations

328 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of the white man. But to-day I like best the echo amid these
cliffs and woods. It is no feeble imitation, but rather its orig-
inal, or as if some rural Orpheus played over the strain again
to show how it should sound.

Dong, sounds the brass in the east,

As if to a funeral feast,

But I like that sound best
Out of the fluttering west.

The steeple ringeth a knell.

But the fairies’ silvery bell
Is the voice of that gentle folk.

Or else the horizon that spoke.

Its metal is not of brass,

But air, and water, and glass,

And under a cloud it is swung,

And by the wind it is rung.

When the steeple tolleth the noon,

It soundeth not so soon.

Yet it rings a far earlier hour,

And the sun has not reached its tower.

On the other hand, the road runs up to Carlisle, city of the
Woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural. It does
well hold the earth together. It gets laughed at because it is
a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where
great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow
right on over it without distinction. It has a meeting-house
and horse-sheds, a tavern and a blacksmith’s shop for centre,
«nd a good deal of wood to cut and cord yet. And

‘‘Bedford, most noble Bedford,

I shall not thee forget/’

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 329
History has remembered thee; especially that meek and
humble petition of thy old planters, like the wailing of the
Lord's own people, 'To the gentlemen, the selectmen" of
Concord, praying to be erected into a separate parish. We can
hardly credit that so plaintive a psalm resounded but little
more than a century ago along these Babylonish waters. 'Tn
the extreme difficult seasons of heat and cold," said they,
"we were ready to say of the Sabbath, Behold what a weari-
ness is it." — "Gentlemen, if our seeking to draw off proceed
from any disaffection to our present reverend pastor, or the
Christian society with whom we have taken such sweet counsel
together, and walked unto the house of God in company,
then hear us not this day, but we greatly desire, if God please,
to be eased of our burden on the Sabbath, the travel and
fatigue thereof, that the word of God may be nigh to us, near
to our houses, and in our hearts, that we and our little ones
may serve the Lord. We hope that God, who stirred up the
spirit of Cyrus to set forward temple work, has stirred us up
to ask, and will stir you up to grant, the prayer of cur petition;
so shall your humble petitioners ever pray, as in duty bound,
— ."And so the temple work went forward here to a happy
conclusion. Yonder in Carlisle the building of the temple was
many wearisome years delayed, not that there was wanting
of Shittim wood, or the gold of Ophir, but a site therefor con-
venient to all the worshippers; whether on "Buttrick's Plain,"
or rather on "Poplar Hill:" it was a tedious question.

In this Billerica solid men must have lived, select from
year to year, a series of town clerks, at least, and there are
old records that you may search. Some spring the white man
came, built him a house, and made a clearing here, letting in
the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old gray stones in fences,
cut down the pines around his dwelling^ planted orchard seeds
brought from the old country, and persuaded the civil apple
tree to blossom next to the wild pine and the juniper, shedding
its perfume in the wilderness. Their old stocks still remain. He
culled the graceful elm from out the woods and from the

330 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
river-side, and so refined and smoothed his village plot. And
thus he plants a town. He rudely bridged the stream, and
drove his team afield into the river meadows, cut the wild
grass, and laid bare the homes of beaver, otter, muskrat, and
with the whetting of his scythe scared off the deer and bear.
He set up a mill, and fields of English grain sprang in the
virgin soil. And with his grain he scattered the seeds of the
dandelion and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his
English flowers with the v/ild native ones. The bristling bur-
dock, the sweet scented catnip, and the humble yarrow,
planted themselves along his woodland road, they too seek-
ing “freedom to worship God” in their way. The white man’s
mullein soon reigned in Indian corn-fields, and sweet scented
English grasses clothed the new soil. Where, then, could the
red man set his foot? The honey bee hummed through the
Massachusetts woods, and sipped the wild flowers round the
Indian’s wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with prophetic
warning, it stung the red child’s hand, forerunner of that in-
dustrious tribe that was to come and pluck the wild flower of
his race up by the root.

The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of
thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up,
knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating;
strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of
experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense;
dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of
little humor but genuine ; a laboring man, despising game and
sport; building a house that endures, a framed house. He
buys the Indian’s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunt-
ing grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried, and
plows up his bones. And here town records, old, tattered,
time-worn, weather-stained chronicles, contain the Indian
sachem’s mark, perchance an arrow or a beaver, and the few
fatal words by which he deeded his hunting grounds away.
He comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic
names, and strews them up and down this river, — Framing-

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 331
ham, Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford, —
and this is New Angle-land, and these are the new West
Saxons, whom the red men call, not Angle-ish or English, but
Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees.

When we were opposite to the middle of Billerica, the fields
on either hand had a soft and cultivated English aspect, the
village spire being seen over the copses which skirt the river,
and sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water side,
though, generally, our course this forenoon was the wildest
part of our voyage. It seemed that men led a quiet and very
civil life there. The inhabitants were plainly cuVivators of
the earth, and lived under an organized political government.
The school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a
long truce to war and savage life. Every one finds by his own
experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men
cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is es-
sentially different from that of the hunter and forest life,
and neither can displace the other without loss. We have all
had our day dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal
visions, but as for farming, I am convinced that my genius
dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least
strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom
but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is
in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wild-
ness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere
love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on
to this ground. What have I to do with plows? I cut another
furrow than you see. Where the off ox treads, there is it not,
it is further off ; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is
nigher still. If corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are
drought and rain to me? The rude Saxon pioneer will some-
times pine for that refinement and artificial beauty which are
English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical
names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dovei
and the Trossacks, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere,
which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon,

332 IHE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

of Baiae, and Athens with its sea walls, and Arcadia and

Tempe.

Greece, who am I that should remember thee,

Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae?

Is my life vulgar, my fate mean.

Which on these golden memories can lean?

We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn’s
Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense, but they im-
ply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is civil and social,
but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the out-
law. There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of
anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cul-
tivated man, — all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-
born virtues are but good manners! The young pines springing
up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refresh-
ing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the
name for his improvement. By the wary independence and
aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse
with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a
rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry
recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady
illumination of his genuis, dim only because distant, is like
the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the
dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The
Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not
supposed to be ^^of equal antiquity with the atua fauau pOj or
night-born gods.” It is true, there are the innocent pleasures
of country life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the
earth yield her increase, and gather the fruits in their season,
but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retire-
ments and more rugged paths. It will have its garden plots
and its parterres elsewhere than on the earth, and gather
nuts and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard
fruits with such heedlessness as berries. We would not always

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 333
be soothing and taming Nature, breaking the horse and the
ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo.
The Indian^s intercourse with Nature is at least such as
admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat
of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a
familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's
closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the
former's distance. In civilization, as in a southern latitude,
man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more
northern tribes.

‘^Some nation yet shut in
With hills of ice."

There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of Nature
than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry.
Homer and-Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston.
And yet behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere
tradition, or the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavor
of these wild fruits. If we could listen but for an instant to
the chaunt of the Indian muse, we should understand why he
will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations
are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations;
but the Indian does well to continue Indian.

After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets,
I have been out early on a foggy morning, and heard the cry
of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the
common, unexplored by science or by literature. None of the
feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of
the woodland depths. I had seen the red Election-bird brought
from their recesses on my comrades' string, and fancied that
their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling
colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced
further into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less
have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet’s string.

334 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

By noon we were let down into the Merrimack through the
locks at Middlesex, just above Pawtucket Falls, by a serene
and liberal-minded man, who came quietly from his book,
though his duties, we supposed, did not require him to open
the locks on Sundays. With him we had a just and equal
encounter of the eyes, as between two honest men.

The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and un-
conscious courtesy of the parties. It is said that a rogue does
not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look
at you as if he had his reputation to establish. I have seen
some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meet-
ing yours. A truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser
than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. Serpents
alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend
looks me in the face and sees me, that is all.

The best relations were at once established between us
and this man, and though few words were spoken, he could
not conceal a visible interest in us and our excursion. He
was a lover of the higher mathematics, as we found, and in
the midst of some vast sunny problem, when we overtook
him and whispered our conjectures. By this man we were
presented with the freedom of the Merrimack. We now felt
as if we were fairly launched on the ocean-stream of our
voyage, and were pleased to find that our boat would float
on Merrimack water. We began again busily to put in prac-
tice those old arts of rowing, steering, and paddling. It seemed
a strange phenomenon to us that the two rivers should mingle
their waters so readily, since we had never associated .hem in
our thoughts.

As we glided over the broad bosom of the Merrimack, be-
tween Chelmsford and Dracut, at noon, here a quarter of
a mile wide, the rattling of our oars was echoed over the
water to those villages, and their slight sounds to us. Their
harbors lay as smooth and fairy-like as the Lido, or Syracuse,
or Rhodes, in our imagination, while, like some strange
roving craft, we flitted past what seemed the dwellings of

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 33S
noble home-staying men, seemingly as conspicuous as if on
an eminence, or floating upon a tide which came up to those
villagers’ breasts. At a third of a mile over the water we heard
distinctly some children repeating their catechism in a cottage
near the shore, while in the broad shallows between, a herd of
cows stood lashing their sides, and waging war with the flies.

Two hundred years ago other catechising than this was
going on here; for here came the sachem Wannalancet, and
his people, and sometimes Tahatawan, our Concord Sachem,
who afterwards had a church at home, to catch fish at the
falls; and here also came John Eliot, with the Bible and
Catechism and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and other
tracts, done into the Massachusetts tongue, and taught them
Christianity meanwhile. ‘‘This place,” says Gookin, referring
to Wamesit,

“being an ancient and capital seat of Indians, they come to
fish; and this good man takes this opportunity to spread the
net of the gospel, to fish for their souls.” — “May 5th, 1674,’^
he continues, “according to our usual custom, Mr. Eliot and
myself took our journey to Wamesit, or Pawtuckett; and
arriving there that evening, Mr. Eliot preached to as man)'’
of them as could be got together, out of Matt. xxii. 1-14,
the parable of the marriage of the king’s son. We met at
the wigwam of one called Wannalancet, about two miles
from the town, near Pawtuckett Falls, and bordering upon
Merrimak river. This person, Wannalancet, is the eldest
son of old Pasaconaway, the chiefest sachem of Pawtuckett.
He is a sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty
and sixty. He hath been always loving and friendly to the
English.” As yet, however, they had not prevailed on him
to embrace the Christian religion. “But at this time,” says
Gookin, “May 6, 1674,” — ^“after some deliberation and
serious pause, he stood up, and made a speech to this effect:
— ‘I must acknowledge I have, all my days, used to pass in

336 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
an old canoe, (alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a
canoe upon the river) and now you exhort me to change and
leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which
I have hitherto been unwilling; but now I yield up myself
to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and to engage to
pray to God hereafter.’ ” One ‘‘Mr. Richard Daniel, a gentle-
man that lived in Billerica,” who with other “persons of
quality” was present, “desired brother Eliot to tell the sachem
from him, that it may be, while he went m his old canoe, he
passed in a quiet stream; but the end thereof was death and
destruction to soul and body. But now he went into a new
canoe, perhaps he would meet with storms and trials, but
yet he should be encouraged to persevere, for the end of his
voyage would be everlasting rest.” — “Since that time, I hear
this sachem doth persevere, and is a constant and diligent
hearer of God’s word, and sanctifieth the Sabbath, though he
doth travel to Wamesit meeting every Sabbath, which is above
two miles ; and though sundry of his people have deserted him,
since he subjected to the gospel, yet he continues and per-
sists.” ^

Already, as appears from the records, “At a General Court
held at Boston in New England, the 7th of the first month,
1643-4.” — “Wassamequin, Nashoonon, Kutchamaquin, Mas-
saconomet, and Squaw Sachem, did voluntarily submit them-
selves” to the English; and among other things did “promise
to be willing from time to time to be instructed in the knowl-
edge of God.” Being asked “Not to do any unnecessary work
on the Sabbath day, especially within the gates of Christian
towns,” they answered, “It is easy to them; they have not
much to do on any day, and they can well take their rest on
that day.” — “So,” says Winthrop, in his Journal, “we causing
them to understand the articles, and all the ten command-
ments of God, and they freely assenting to all, they were
solemnly received, and then presented the Court with twenty-

^ Gookin*s Hist. Coll, of the Indians in New England, 1674.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 337
six fathom more of wampom; and the Court gave each of
them a coat of two yards of cloth, and their dinner; and to
them and their men, every of them, a cup of sack at their
departure; and so they took leave and went away.’’

What journeying on foot and on horseback through the
wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and musk-
rats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a
natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curi-
osity or even interest, till at length there were “praying In-
dians,” and, as the General Court wrote to Cromwell, the
“work is brought to this perfection, that some of the Indians
themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.”

It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through
which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a
race of hunters and warriors. Their weirs of stone, their
arrowheads and hatchets, their pestles, and the mortars in
which they pounded Indian corn before the white man had
tasted it, lay concealed in the mud of the river bottom. Tradi-
tion still points out the spots where they took fish in the
greatest numbers, by such arts as they possessed. It is a rapid
story the historian will have to put together. Miantonimo, —
Winthrop, — ^Webster. Soon he comes from Mount Hope to
Bunker Hill, from bear-skins, parched corn, bows and arrows^
to tiled roofs, wheat fields, guns and swords. Pawtucket and
Wamesit, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are
now Lowell, the city of spindles, and Manchester of America,
which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we youth-
ful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village ot
Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was
its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not
yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.

We were thus entering the State of New Hampshire on the
bosom of the flood formed by the tribute of its innumerable
valleys. The river was the only key which could unlock its

338 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
maze, presenting its hills and valleys, its lakes and streams,
in their natural order and position. The Merrimack, or
Sturgeon River, is formed by the confluence of the Pemi-
gewasset, which rises near the Notch of the White Mountains,
and the Winnepisiogee, which drain the lake of the same
name, signifying “The Smile of the Great Spirit.” From their
junction it runs south seventy-eight miles to Massachusetts,
and thence east thirty-five miles to the sea. I have traced its
stream from where it bubbles out of the rocks of the White
Mountains above the clouds, to where it is lost amid the salt
billows of the ocean on Plum Island beach. At first it comes
on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired
mountains, through moist primitive woods whose juices it re-
ceives, where the bear still drinks it, and the cabins of settlers
are far between, and there are few to cross its stream ; enjoying
in solitude its cascades still unknown to fame ; by long ranges
of mountains of Sandwich and of Squam, slumbering like
tumuli of Titans, with the peaks of Mossehillock, the Hay-
stack, and Kearsarge reflected in its waters ; where the maple
and the raspberry, those lovers of the hills, flourish amid
temperate dews; — flowing long and full of meaning, but
untranslatable as its name Pemigewasset, by many a pastured
Pelion and Ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by
Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, and receiving the tribute of many
an untasted Hippocrene. There are earth, air, fire, and water,
— ^very well, this is water, and down it comes.

Such water do the gods distil.

And pour down every hill
For their New England men;

A draught of this wild nectar bring.

And I’ll not taste the spring
Of Helicon again.

Falling all the way, and yet not discouraged by the lowest fall.
By the law of its birth never to become stagnant, for it has

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 339
come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn
in the flood, through beaver dams broke loose, not splitting
but splicing and mending itself, until it found a breathing
place in this low land. There is no danger now that the sun
will steal it back to heaven again before it reach the sea, for
it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom
again with interest at every eve.

It was already the water of Squam and Newfound Lake and
Winnepisiogee, and White Mountain snow, dissolved, on
which we weie floating, and Smith’s and Baker’s and Mad
rivers, and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag, and Sun-
cook and Soucook and Contoocook, mingled in incalculable
proportions, still fluid, yellowish, restless all, with an ancient,
ineradicable inclination to the sea.

So it flows on down by Lowell and Haverhill, at which last
place it first suffers a sea change, and a few masts betray the
vicinity of the ocean. Between the towns of Amesbury and
Newbury it is a broad commercial river, from a third to half
a mile in width, no longer skirted with yellow and crumbling
banks, but backed by high green hills and pastures, with fre-
quent white beaches on which the fishermen draw up their
nets. I have passed down this portion of the river in a steam-
boat, and it was a pleasant sight to watch from its deck the
fishermen dragging their seines on the distant shore, as in
pictures of a foreign strand. At intervals you may meet with
a schooner laden with lumber, standing up to Haverhill, or
else lying at anchor or aground, waiting for wind or tide ; until,
at last, you glide under the famous Chain Bridge, and are
landed at Newburyport. Thus she who at first was “poore
of waters, naked of renowne,” having received so many fair
tributaries, as was said of the Forth,

‘^Doth grow the greater still, the further downe;

Till that abounding both in power and fame,

She long doth strive to give the sea her name;^^

340 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
or if not her name, in this case, at least the impulse of her
stream. From the steeples of Newburyport, you may review
this river stretching far up into the country, v/ith many a
white sail glancing over it like an inland sea, and behold, as
one wrote who was born on its head-waters, “Down out at
its mouth, the dark inky main blending with the blue above.
Plum Island, its sand ridges scolloping along the horizon like
the sea serpent, and the distant outline broken by many a
tall ship, leaning, stilt, against the sky.^’

Rising at an equal height with the Connecticut, the Merri-
mack reaches the sea by a course only half as long, and hence
has no leisure to form broad and fertile meadows like the
former, but is hurried along rapids, and down numerous falls
without long delay. The banks are generally steep and high,
with a narrow interval reaching back to the hills, which is
only occasionally and partially overflown at present, and is
much valued by the farmers. Between Chelmsford and Con-
cord in New Hampshire, it varies from twenty to seventy-five
rods in width. It is probably wider than it was formerly, in
many places, owing to the trees having been cut down, and
the consequent wasting away of its banks. The influence of
the Pawtucket dam is felt as far up as Cromwell’s Falls, and
many think that the banks are being abraded and the river
filled up again by this cause. Like all our rivers, it is liable
to freshets, and the Pemigewasset has been known to rise
twenty-five feet in a few hours. It is navigable for vessels of
burden about twenty miles, for canal boats by means of
locks as far as Concord in New Hampshire, about seventy-
five miles from its mouth, and for smaller boats to Plymouth,
one hundred and thirteen miles. A small steamboat once plied
between Lowell and Nashua, before the railroad was built,
and one now runs from Newburyport to Haverhill.

Unfitted to some extent for the purposes of commerce by
the sand-bar at its mouth, see how this river was devoted
from the first to the service of manufactures. Issuing from
the iron region of Franconia, and flowing through still uncut

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 341
forests, by inexhaustible ledges of granite, with Squam, and
Winnepisiogee, and Newfound, and Massabesic lakes for its
millponds, it falls over a succession of natural dams, where
it has been offering its privileges in vain for ages, until at last
the Yankee race came to improve them. Standing here at
its mouth, look up its sparkling stream to its source, — a silver
cascade which falls all the way from the White Mountains to
the sea, — and behold a city on each successive plateau, a busy
colony of human beaver around every fall. Not to mention
Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence, and Lowell, and
Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one above
the other. When at length it has escaped from under the last
of the factories it has a level and unmolested passage to the
sea, a mere waste water, as it were, bearing little with it but
its fame; its pleasant course revealed by the morning fog
which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small vessels
which transact the commerce of Haverhill and Newburyport.
But its real vessels are railroad cars, and its true and main
stream, flowing by an iron channel further south, may be
traced by a long line of vapor amid the hills, which no morn-
ing wind ever disperses, to where it empties into the sea at
Boston. This side is the louder murmur now. Instead of the
scream of a fish-hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle
of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

This river too was at length discovered by the white man,
^^trending up into the land,’^ he knew not how far, possibly
an inlet to the South Sea. Its valley, as far as the Winne-
pisiogee, was first surveyed in 1652. The first settlers of
Massachusetts supposed that the Connecticut, in one part
of its course, ran north-west, ‘‘so near the great lake as the
Indians do pass their canoes into it over land.” From which
lake and the “hideous swamps” about it, as they supposed,
came all the beaver that was traded between Virginia and
Canada, — and the Potomac was thought to come out of or
from very near it. Afterward the Connecticut came so near
the course of the Merrimack, that with a little pains they

342 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
expected to divert the current of the trade into the latter river,
and its profits from their Dutch neighbors into their own
pockets.

Unlike the Concord, the Merrimack is not a dead but a
living stream, though it has less life within its waters and on
its banks. It has a swift current, and, in this part of its
course, a clayey bottom, almost no weeds, and comparatively
few fishes. We looked down into its yellow water with the
more curiosity, who were accustomed to the Nile-like black-
ness of the former river. Shad and alewives are taken here
in their season, but salmon, though at one time more numerous
than shad, are now more rare. Bass, also, are taken occa-
sionally; but locks and dams have proved more or less de-
structive to the fisheries. The shad make their appearance
early in May, at the same time with the blossoms of the
pyrus, one of the most conspicuous early flowers, which is
for this reason called the shad-blossom. An insect, called
the shad-fly, also appears at the same time, covering the
houses and fences. We are told that “their greatest run is
when the apple trees are in full blossom. The old shad return
in August; the young, three or four inches long, in September.
These are very fond of flies.’’ A rather picturesque and lux-
urious mode of fishing was formerly practised on the Con-
necticut, at Bellows Falls, where a large rock divides the
stream. “On the steep sides of the island rock,” says Belknap,
“hang several arm chairs, fastened to ladders, and secured by
a counterpoise, in which fishermen sit to catch salmon and
shad with dipping nets.” The remains of Indian weirs, made
of large stones, are still to be seen in the Winnepisiogee, one
of the head-waters of this river.

It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be re-
minded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad,
alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the
innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the
interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again,
of the fry, which in still greater numbers wend their way

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 343
downward to the sea. ^‘And is it not pretty sport,” wrote
Capt. John Smith, who v/as on this coast as early as 1614,
‘^to pull up twopence, sixpence, and twelvepence, as fast as
you can haul and veer a line?” — ^‘^And what sport doth yield
a more pleasing content, and less hurt or charge, than angling
with a hook, and crossing the sweet air from isle to isle, over
the silent streams of a calm sea.”

On the sandy shore, opposite the Glass-house village in
Chelmsford, at the Great Bend, where we landed to rest us
and gather a few wild plums, we discovered the campanula
rotundi folia, a new flower to us, the harebell of the poets,
which is common to both hemispheres, growing close to the
water. Here, in the shady branches of an apple tree on the
sand, we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr
to disturb the repose of this glorious Sabbath day, and we
reflected serenely on the long past and successful labors of
Latona.

*^So silent is the cessile air,

That every cry and call.

The hills and dales, and forest fair,

Again repeats them all.

‘^The herds beneath some leafy trees,

Amidst the flowers they lie,

The stable ships upon the seas
Tend up their sails to dry.”

As we thus rested in the shade, or rowed leisurely along,
we had recourse, from time to time, to the Gazetteer, which
was our Navigator, and from its bald natural facts extracted
the pleasure of poetry. Beaver river comes in a little lower
down, draining the meadows of Pelham, Windham, and Lon-
donderry. The Scotch-Irish settlers of the latter town, ac-

344 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
cording to this authority, were the first to introduce the potato
into New England, as well as the manufacture of linen cloth.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains
some echo at least of the best that is in literature. Indeed,
the best books have a use like sticks and stones, which is
above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface,
nor concluded in the appendix. Even Virgil’s poetry serves
a very different use to me to-day from what it did to his
contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental
value merely, proving that man is still man in the world.
It is pleasant to meet with such still lines as,

“Jam Ijeto turgent in palmite gemmae; ”

Now the buds swell on the joyful stem;

or

“Strata jacent passim sua quaeque sub arbore poma.^’

The apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree.

In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living
nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written
while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommenda-
tion when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed
sunshine and daylight.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now,
which would be in harmony with the scenery, — for if men
read aright, methinks they would never read anything but
poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove
false by setting aside its requisitions. We can, therefore, pub-
lish only our advertisement of it.

There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either
rl\ymed, or in some way musically measured, — is, in form
as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should con-

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 345
tain the condensed wisdom of mankind, need not have one
rhythmless line.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural
fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine
a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the
chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose
narrative of poetic deeds. What else have the Hindoos, the
Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians done, that can be
told? It is the simplest relation of phenomena, and describes
the commonest sensations with mure truth than science does,
and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and meth-
ods. The poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. He per-
forms his functions, and is so well that he needs such stimulus
to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and blossoms. He
would strive in vain to modulate the remote and transient
music which he sometimes hears, since his song is a vital func-
tion like breathing, and an integral result like weight. It is
not the overflowing of life but of its subsidence rather, and
is drawn from under the feet of the poet. It is enough if Homer
but say the sun sets. He is as serene as nature, and we can
hardly detect the enthusiasm of the bard. It is as if nature
spoke. He presents to us the simplest pictures of human life,
so that childhood itself can understand them, and the man
must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. Each
reader discovers for himself, that, with respect to the simpler
features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than
copy his similes. His more memorable passages are as nat--
urally bright, as gleams of sunshine in misty weather. Nature
furnishes him not only with words, but with stereotyped lines
and sentences from her mint.

‘‘As from the clouds appears the full moon.

All shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds,
So Hector, at one time appeared among the foremost.

And at another in the rear, commanding; and all with brass
He shone, like to the lightning of segis-bearing Zeus.’*

346 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
He conveys the least information, even the hour of the day,
with such magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery,
as if it were a message from the gods.

‘While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing.

For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people
fell;

But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning
meal.

In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands
With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind.

And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts;
Then the Danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes,
Shouting to their companions from rank to rank.’’

When the army of the Trojans passed the night under arms,
keeping watch lest the enemy should re-embark under cover
of the dark,

“They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war
Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them.

As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;

And all the heights, and the extreme summits.

And the wooded sides of the mountains appear ; and from the
heavens an infinite ether is diffused.

And all the stars are seen; and the shepherd rejoices in his
heart;

So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium.

A thousand fires burned on the plain; and by each
Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire;

And horses eating white barley and corn.

Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora,”

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 347
The “white>armed goddess Juno,” sent by the Father of
gods and men for Iris and Apollo,

^ Went down the Idaean mountains to far Olympus,

As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,

There was I, and there, and remembers many things ;

So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
And came to high Olympus.”

His scenery is always true, and not invented. He does not
leap in imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air,

87relT] fxoka iroXka \iEXa^V

“'Ou/aEa TE axiOEvta, Oakdooa te T];(r|e(Taa.

for there are very many
Shady mountains and resounding seas between.

If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do
not wonder how they got there, but accompany them step
by step along the shore of the resounding sea. Nestor^s account
of the march of the Pylians against the Epeians is extremely
lifelike: —

“Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator
of the Pylians,

And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.”

This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone. — ^‘^A cer-
tain river, Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene,
where we Pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot. Thence
with all haste we sped as on the morrow ere ’t was noon-day,
accoutred for the fight, even to Alpheus’ sacred source, &c.”
We fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the Minyas
discharging its waters into the main the livelong night, and
the hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore, — ^until

348 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
at length we are cheered at the close of a toilsome march
by the gurgling fountains of Alpheus.

There are few books which are fit to be remembered in
our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest
days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia
Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its
height, or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of liter-
ature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the
mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their
dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed
in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays
of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the
sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast
down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his
rising. —

‘^Horner is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god, — all that then was save Heaven.’’

So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his
Orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them. The
mythological system of the ancients, — and it is still the
mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind, — inter-
woven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in
grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens them-
selves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius in-
habited the earth. But after all, man is the great poet, and
not Homer or Shakspeare; and our language itself, and the
common arts of life are his work. Poetry is so universally
true and independent of experience, that it does not need any
particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or
later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of
humanity, and the gods themselves.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 349

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for Looks
are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never
statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals,
but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again,
or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might
offer up our perfect (teJieia) thoughts to the gods daily, in
hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once
a day. The whole of the day should not be daytime; there
should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring
forth. Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of
learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator
prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature
of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy
and much of German criticism? Read the best books first, or
you may not have a chance to read them at all. “There are
the worshippers with offerings, and the worshippers with mor-
tifications; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devo-
tion ; so there are those, the wisdom of whose reading is their
worship, men of subdued passions and severe manners; — This
world is not for him who doth not worship; and where,
O Arjoon, is there another?” Certainly, we do not need to be
soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts
to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if
he took a nap. The front aspect of great thoughts can only be
/enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which
each thought is of unusiuil daring; such as an idle man cannot
read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even
make us dangerous to existing institutions, — such call I good
books.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not
necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked
with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base
wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises. “The way
to trade,” as a pedler once told me, “is to put it right throughl^
no matter what it is, anything that is agreed on. —

350 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
‘^You grov’ling worldings, you whose wisdom trades
Where light ne’er shot his golden ray.”

By dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cunningly
compiled, and have their run and success even among the
learned, as if they were the result of a new man’s thinking,
and their birth vere attended with some natural throes.
But in a little while their covers fall off, for no binding will
avail, and it appears that they are not Books or Bibles at all.
There are new and patented inventions in this shape, purport-
ing to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure
scholar and genius who has learned to read is for a moment
deceived by, and finds himself reading a horse-rake, or
spinning jenny, or wooden nutmeg, or oak-leaf cigar, or steam-
power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when he was seek-
ing serene and biblical truths. —

^^Merchants, arise,

And mingle conscience with your merchandise.”

Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book be-
fore they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for
wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place
in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame
merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled
into brandy. Books are for the most part wilfully and hastily
written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imag-
ined. Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty
schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk.
They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but
the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying
nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil onl}^
into that dilemma where the professors always dwell. —

^^To Athens gown’d he goes, and from that school
Returns unsped, a more instructed fool.”

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 351
They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge,
for to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it
is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a
chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of
science can never span. A book should contain pure discoveries,
glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and
not the art of navigation by those who have never been out
of sight of land. They must not yield wheat and potatoes, but
must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of
their author’s lives. —

“What I have learned is mine; I’ve had my thought,

And me the Muses noble truths have taught.”

We do not learn much from learned books, but from traCj
sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the
life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly
in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are
sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind.
The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and
»‘ain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs
the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the al-
burnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the
sapling.

At least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a
kitchen range which is not cracked. Let not the poet shed
tears only for the public weal. He should be as vigorous as a
sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure,
beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which
being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in
the endeavor to heal its wounds. The poet is he that hath fat
enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter.
He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow. It
is pleasant to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy
pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of

.^52 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
'dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have
such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, im-
pervious to cold. Alas, the poet too is, in one sense, a sort of
dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene
thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words
are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom
drawn from the remotest experience. Other men lead a starved
existence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the
wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.

There are already essays and poems, the growth of this
land, which are not in vain, all which, however, we could
conveniently have stowed in the till of our chest. If the gods
permitted their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, these
might be overlooked in the crowd, but the accents of truth
are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven. They
already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces
of their modern birth. Here are they who

‘^ask for that which is our whole lifers light,

For the perpetual, true, and clear insight.’^

1 remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its
native pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not
as if spread over a sandy embankment; answering to the
poet^s prayer.

‘Xet us set so just

A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust
The poet^s sentence, and not still aver
Each art is to itself a flatterer.^^

But, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the
peaceful games of the Lyceum, from which a new era will
he dated to New England, as from the games of Greece?

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 3SJ
For if Herodotus carried his history to Olympia to read, after
the cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories re-
cited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made
Greece sometimes to be forgotten? — Philosophy, too, has
there her grove and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these
days.

Lately the victor, whom all Pindars praised, has won an-
other palm, contending with

^^Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below.

Which always find us young,

And always keep us so’^ —

What earth or sea, mountain or stream, or Muses’ spring or
grove, is safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives off
Phoebus’ beaten track, visits unwonted zones, makes the gelid
Hyperboreans glow, and the old polar serpent writhe, and
many a Nile flow back and hide his head ! —

That Phaeton of our day,

Who’d make another milky way,

And burn the world up with his ray;

By us an undisputed seer, —

Who’d drive his flaming car so near
Unto our shuddering mortal sphere,

Disgracing all our slender worth,

And scorching up the living earth,

To prove his heavenly birth.

The silver spokes, the golden tire,

Are glowing with unwonted fire,

And ever nfgher roll and nigher;

354 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
The pins and axle melted are,

The silver radii fly afar,

Ah, he will spoil his Father^s car!

Who let him have the steeds he cannot steer?
Henceforth the sun will not shine for a year.
And we shall Ethiops all appear.

From his

“lips of cunning fell

The thrilling Delphic oracle.”

And yet, sometimes.

We should not mind if on our ear there fell
Some less of cunning, more of oracle.

It is Apollo shining in your face. 0 rare Contemporary, let

us have far off heats. Give us the subtler, the heavenlier

though fleeting beauty, which passes through and through,
and dwells not in the verse; even pure water, which but
reflects those tints which wine wears in its grain. Let epic
trade-winds blow, and cease this waltz of inspirations. Let
us oftener feel even the gentle south-west wind upon our
cheeks blowing from the Indians^ heaven. What though we
lose a thousand meteors from the sky, if skyey depths, if star-
dust and undissolvable nebulae remain? What though we lose
a thousand wise responses of the oracle, if we may have
instead some natural acres of Ionian earth?

Though we know well,

^^That ’t is not in the power of kings [or presidents] to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto,

Nor are they born in every prince’s days ; ”

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 3SS
yet spite of all they sang in praise of their ^^Eliza’s reign,”
we have evidence that poets may be born and sing in our day,
in the presidency of James K. Polk,

‘^And that the utmost powers of English rhyme,”

Were not “within her peaceful reign confined.”

The prophecy of Samuel Daniel is already how much more
than fulfilled!

“And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores
This gain of our best glor}^ shall be sent,

T^ enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in th^ yet unformed Occident,

May come refined with the accents that are ours.”

Enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent
writing. We hear it complained of some works of genius, that
they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow.
But even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye
of science, parts of one range. We should consider that the
flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone river,
and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any declivity
in its channel. The river flows because it runs down hill, and
descends the faster as it flows more rapidly. The reader who
expects to float down stream for the whole voyage, may well
complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea when
his frail shore-craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean
stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser
streams to it. But if we would appreciate the flow that is in
these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like
an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like hurt
millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves.
There is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows
as glibly as a mill stream sucking under a causeway; and

356 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse,
Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt beside them. Their
long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency that they
naturally flow and run together. They read as if written for
military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch
in them. Compared with these, the grave thinkers and philos-
ophers seem not to have got their swaddling clothes off; they
aie slower than a Roman army in its march, the rear camping
to-night where the \an camped last night. The wise Jam-
blichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough.

‘ How many thousand, never heard the name
Of Sidney, or of Spenser, or their books?

And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame,

And seem to bear down all the wo^ld with looks.^’

The ready writer seizes the pen, and shouts, Forward I Alamo
and Fanning I and after rolls the tide of war. The very walls
and fences seem to travel. But the most rapid trot is no flow
after all, — and thither you and I, at least, reader, will not
follow.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.
For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the
thought ; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morn-
ing or evening without their colors, or the heavens without
their azure. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not
the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken
firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know
what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well
learned. Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only
for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the
midst of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in
his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between
the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not
furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather
like a western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 357
underwood, and one may ride on horse-back through the
openings. All the distinguished writers of that period, possess
a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, — for
it is allowed to slander our own time, — and when we read a
quotation from one of them in the midst of a modern author,
we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground, a
greater depth and strength of soil. It is as if a green bough
were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight
of fresh grass in mid-winter or early spring. You have con-
stantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read.
The little that is said is eked out by implication of the much
that \/as done. The sentences are verduous and blooming as
evergreen and flowers, because they are looted in fact and
experience, but our false and florid sentences have only the
tints of flowers without their sap or roots. All men are really
most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even
write in a florid style in imitation of this. They prefer to be
misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.
Hussein Effendi praised the epistolary style of Ibrahim Pasha
to the French traveller Botta, because of “the difficulty of
understanding it; there was,^’ he said, “but one person at
Jidda who was capable of understanding and explaining the
Pasha’s correspondence.” A man’s whole life is taxed for the
least thing well done. It is its net result. Every sentence is
the result of a long probation. Where shall we look for stand-
ard English, but to the words of a standard man? The word
which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for
it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done.
Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some
urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest
writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the
fates had such a design^ when, having stored Raleigh so
richly with the substance of life and experience, they made
him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his
deeds, and transfer to his expression *he emphasis and sin-
cerity of his action.

358 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly
out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. We are
amused to read how Ben Jonson engaged, that the dull masks
with which the royal family and nobility were to be enter-
tained, should be “grounded upon antiquity and solid learn-
ing.’^ Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning?
Learn to split wood, at least. The necessity of labor and con^
versation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely
well remembered; steady labor with the hands, which en-
grosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method
of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both
of speaking and writing. If he has worked hard from morning
till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be
watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the
few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s experience
will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy
could have furnished. Surely the writer is to address a world
of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline. He
will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord
before nightfall in the short days of winter ; but every stroke
will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and
so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening
record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the
ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died
away. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher
truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the
sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful
effort without a corresponding energy of the body. We are
often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard’
working men, unpractised in writing, easily attain, when re*
quired to make the effort. As if plainness, and vigor, and
sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the
farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences
written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hard-
ened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.
As for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 359
in a mean dress; but though it proceed from the lips of the
Woloffs, the nine Muses and the three Graces will have con-
spired to clothe it in fit phrase. Its education has always been
liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college. The scholar
might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the
farmer’s call to his team, and confess that if that were
written it would surpass his labored sentences. Whose are the
truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods
of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even
to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s
labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.
A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow
instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight
to the end. The scholar requires hard and serious labor to
give an impetus to his thought. He will learn to grasp the pen
firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe
or a sword. When we consider the weak and nerveless periods
of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come
up to the standard of their race, and are not deficient in girth
also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and
sinews. What! these proportions, — these bones, — and this
their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed
this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady’s fin-
gers! Can this be a stalwart man’s work, who has a marrow
in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel? They who set
up the blocks of Stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid
out their strength for once, and stretched themselves.

Yet, after all, the truly efficient laborer will not crowd his
day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a
wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he loves
best. He is anxious only about the fruitful kernels of time.
Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg,
and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though
it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly.

360 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an
eternity. —

Then spend an age in whetting thy desire,

Thou need’st not hasten if thou dost stand fast.

Some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for
resolves to draw breath in. We do not directly go about
the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors
behind us, and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were
already done. Our resolution is taking root or hold on the
earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward which is fed
by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to the light.

There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some
books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough.
There may be nothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the
expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is
almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader
would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
Some have this merit only. The scholar is not apt to make
his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of
his expression. Very few men can speak of Nature, for
instance, with any truth. They overstep her modesty, some-
how or other, and confer no favor. They do not speak a good
word for her. Most cry better than speak, and you can get
more nature out of them by pinching than by addressing
them. The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of
his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better
than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of Nature.
Better that the primrose by the river^s brim be a yellow
primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less.
Aubrey relates of Thomas Fuller that his was ^^a very work-
ing head, insomuch that, walking and meditating before din-
ner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 361
His natural memory was very great, to which he added the
art of memory. He would repeat to you forwards and back-
wards all the signs from Lu Igate to Charing-cross.^^ He says
of Mr. John Hales, that ‘‘He loved Canarie,^^ and was buried

“under an altar monument of black marble ^with a too

long epitaph of Edmund Halley, that he, “at sixteen could
make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a brave
fellow; of William Holder, who wrote a book upon his curing
one Popham who was deaf and dumb, “he was beholding to
no author; did only consult with Nature.” For the most part,
an author consults only with all who have written before
him upon a subject, and his book is but the advice of so many.
But a good book will never have been forestalled, but the
topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consult-
ing with Nature, will consult not only with those who have
gone before, but with those who may come after. There is
always room and occasion enough for a true book on any
subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and
more rays will not interfere with the first.

Soon the village of Nashua was out of sight, and the woods
were gained again, and we rowed slowly on before sunset,
looking for a solitary place in which to spend the night. A
few evening clouds began to be reflected in the water, and
the surface was dimpled only here and there by a muskrat
crossing the stream. We camped at length near Penichook
Brook, on the confines of Nashville, by a deep ravine, under
the skirts of a pine wood, where the dead pine leaves were
our carpet, and their tawny boughs stretched over head.
But fire and smoke soon tamed the scene; the rocks consented
to be our walls, and the pines our roof. A woodside was already
the fittest locality for us.

The wilderness is near, as well as dear, to every man. Even
the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood
which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men.

362 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in
the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into
the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox
burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness
of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor
of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background,
where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

We had found a safe harbor for our boat, and as the sun
was setting carried up our furniture, and soon arranged our
house upon the bank, and while the kettle steamed at the
tent door, we chatted of distant friends, and of the sights
we were to behold, and wondered which way the towns lay
from us. Our cocoa was soon boiled, and supper set upon our
chest, and we lengthened out this meal, like old voyageurs,
with our talk. Meanwhile we spread the map on the ground,
and read in the gazetteer when the first settlers came here
and got a township granted. Then, when supper was done,
and we had written the journal of our voyage, we wrapped
our buffaloes about us, and lay down with our heads pillowed
on our arms, listening awhile to the distant baying of a dog,
or the murmurs of the river, or to the wind, which had not
gone to rest, —

The western wind came lumbering in.

Bearing a faint Pacific din,

Our evening mail, swift at the call
Of its Post-Master General;

Laden with news from Californ’,

Whatever transpired hath since morn.

How wags the world by brier and brake
From hence to Athabasca lake ; —

or half awake and half asleep, dreaming of a star which
glimmered through our cotton roof. Perhaps at midnight
one was awakened by a cricket shrilly singing on his shoulder,
or by a hunting spider in his eye, and was lulled asleep again

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 363
by some streamlet purling its way along at the bottom of a
wooded and rocky ravine in our neighborhood. It was pleas-
ant to lie with our heads so low in the grass, and hear what a
tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was. A thousand little arti-
sans beat on their anvils all night long.

Far in the night, as we were falling asleep on the bank
of the Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum inces-
santly, in preparation for a country muster, as we learned,
and we thought of the line,

^ When the drum beat at dead of night.’’

We could have assured him that his beat would be answered,
and the forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the
night, we too will be there. And still he drummed on in the
silence of the dark. This stray sound from a far-off sphere
came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant,
and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the
first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an insignificant
drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and
leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These
simple sounds related us to the stars. Aye, there was a logic
in them so convincing that the combined sense of mankind
could never make me doubt their conclusions. I stop my
habitual thinking, as if the plow had suddenly run deeper
in its furrow through the crust of the world. How can I go on,
who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in the
bog of my life. Suddenly old Time winked at me, — Ah, you
know me, you rogue, — and news had come that it »vas well.
That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think un-
doubtedly it will never die. Heal yourselves, doctors , by God
I live. —

Then idle Time ran gadding by
And left me with Eternity alone;

364 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the verge of sight, —

I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to
which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny,
our very Selves ; the one historic truth, the most remarkable
fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject
of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only
fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in
some way forget or dispense with. —

It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leave me single in the crowd.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and
I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Now chiefly is my natal hour.

And only now my prime of life.

I will not doubt the love untold.

Which not my worth nor want hath brought,

Which wooed me young and woos me old.

And to this evening hath me brought.

What are ears? what is Time? that this particular series
of sounds called a strain of music, an invisible and fairy troop
which never brushed the dew from any mead, can be wafted
down through the centuries from Homer to me, and he have
been conversant with that same aerial and mysterious charm
which now so tingles my ears? What a fine communication
from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspira-
tions of ancient men, even such as were never communicated
by speech! It is the flower of language, thought colored and
curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the
sun’s rays, and its purling ripples reflecting the grass and the
clouds. A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 365
Vedas, and I associate with it the idea of infinite remoteness,
as well as beauty and serenity, for to the senses that is fur-
thest from us which addresses the greatest depth within us. It
teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and finest as
the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real experi-
ence. As polishing expresses the vein in marble and grain in
wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. Th^
hero is the sole patron of music. That harmony which exi-^ ,3
naturally between the hero’s moods and the universe the
soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet. When we
are in health all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the
notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when
we awake in the dawn. Marching is when the pulse of the hero
beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the
measure of the universe; then there is true courage and in-
vincible strength.

Plutarch says that “Plato thinks the gods never gave men 1
music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delecta-
tion or to tickle the ear ; but that the discordant parts of the
circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it
that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune
and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses,
might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their
former consent and agreement.”

Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It
is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far
surpass any man’s faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things
are to be learned which i 1 will be worth the while to learn.
Formerly I heard these

RUMORS FROM AN iEOLIAN HARP

There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been.

366 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Such as here lives with toil and strife,

An anxious and a sinful life.

There every virtue has its birth,

Ere it descends upon the .earth,

And thither every deed returns,

Which in the generous bosom burns.

There love is warm, and youth is young,

And poetry is yet unsung,

For V^irtue still adventures there,

And freely breathes her native air.

And ever, if you hearken well,

You still may hear its vesper bell.

And tread of high-souled men go by.

Their thoughts conversing with the sky.

According to Jamblichus, ^Tythagoras did not procure for
himself a thing of this kind through instruments of the voice,
but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is
difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his in-
tellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone
hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal har-
mony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are
moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more
intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.”

Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from
here about twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman^s tavern in
Hampstead toward Haverhill, when I reached the railroad
in Plaistow, I heard at some distance a faint music in the air
like an .^olian harp, which I immediately suspected to pro-
ceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awak-
ening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts
I was convinced that it was so. It wa: the telegraph harp
singing its message through the country, its message sent

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 367
ftot by men but by gods. Perchance, like the statue of Mem-
non, it resounds only in the morning when the first rays of
the sun fall on it. It was like the first lyre or shell heard on the
sea-shore, — that vibrating cord high in the air over the shores
of earth. So have all things their higher and their lower uses.
I heard a fairer news than the journals ever print. It told
of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the electric fluid
to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but
it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which
are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.

Still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresl
extravagance that night. The clarion sound and clang of
corselet and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the
soul, and many a knight was arming for the fight behind the
encamped stars. —

^^Before each van

Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of Heaven the welkin burns.’'

Away! away! away! away!

Ye have not kept your secret well,

I will abide that other day,

Those other lands ye tell.

Has time no leisure left for these,

The acts that ye rehearse?

Is not eternity a lease
For better deeds than verse?

’T is sweet to hear of heroes dead.

To know them still alive,

But sweeter if we earn their bread,

And in us they survive.

368 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Our life should feed the springs of fame
With a perennial wave,

As ocean feeds the babbling founts
Which find in it their grave.

Ye skies drop gently round my breast,

And be my corselet blue,

Ye earth receive my lance in rest,

My faithful charger you ;

Ye stars my spear-heads in the sky,

My arrow-tips ye are, —

I see the routed foemen fly.

My bright spears fixM are.

Give me an angel for a foe.

Fix now the place and time,

And straight to meet him I will go
Above the starry chime.

And with our clashing bucklers’ clang
The heavenly spheres shall ring.

While bright the northern lights shafl hang
Beside our tourneying.

And if she lose her champion true.

Tell Heaven not despair.

For I will be her champion new.

Her fame I will repair.

There was a high wind this night, which we afterwards
learned had been still more violent elsewhere, and had done
much injury to the corn-fields far and near ; but we only heard
it sigh from time to time, as if it had no license to shake the
foundations of our tent ; the pines murmured, the water rip-
pled, and the tent rocked a little, but we only laid our ears

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 369
closer to the ground while the blast swept on to alarm other
men, and long before sunrise we were ready to pursue our
voyage as usual.

Our course this afternoon was between Manchester and
Goffstown.

While we float here, far from that tributary stream on
whose banks our friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts,
like the stars, come out of their horizon still; for there cir-
culates a finer blood than Lavoisier has discovered the laws
of, — the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose
pulse still beats at any distance and forever. After years of
vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious be-
havior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis
than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made
aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have
been times when our friends’ thoughts of us were of so pure
and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds
of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we
were, but as what we aspired to be. There has just reached
us, it may be, the nobleness of some such silent behavior,
not to be forgotten, not to be remembered, and we shudder
to think how it fell on us cold, though in some true but tardy
hour we endeavor to wipe off these scores.

In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject
of conversation, though with a friend, are commonly the most
prosaic and trivial of facts. The universe seems bankrupt
as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals.
Our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow nar-
rower as we advance. How is it that we are impelled to treat
our old friends so ill when we obtain new ones? The house-
keeper says, I never had any new crockery in my life but I
began to break the old. I say, let us speak of mushrooms and
forest trees rather. Yet we can sometimes afford to remember
them in private. —

370 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy,

Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould,

As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,

But after manned him for her own stronghold.

On every side he open was as day.

That you might see no lack of strength within,

For walls and ports do only serve alway
For a pretence to feebleness and sin.

Say not that Caesar was victorious,

With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame-

In other sense this youth was glorious,

Himself a kingdom wheresoe’er he came.

No strength went out to get him victory,

When all was income of its own accord;

For where he went none other was to see.

But all were parcel of their noble lord.

He forayed like the subtile haze of summer,

That stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes.

And revolutions works without ?. murmur.

Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies.

So was I taken unawares by this,

I quite forgot my homage to confess;

Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,

I might have loved him had I loved him less.

Each moment as we nearer drew to each,

A stern respect withheld us further yet.

So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach,

And less acquainted than when first we met.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 371

We two were one while we did sympathize,

So could we not the simplest bargain drive;

And what avails it now that we are wise,

If absence doth this doubleness contrive?

Eternity may not the chance repeat.

But I must tread my single way alone,

In sad remembrance that we once did meet,

And know that bliss irrevocably gone.

The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,

For elegy has other subject none;

Each strain of music in my ears shall ring
Knell of departure from that other one.

Make haste and celebrate my tragedy ;

With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;

Sorrow is dearer in such case to me
Than all the joys other occasion yields.

Is’t then too late the damage to repair?

Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft
The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare.

But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.

If I but love that virtue which he is.

Though it be scented in the morning air.

Still shall we be truest acquaintances,

Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

Friendship is evanescent in every man^s experience, and
remembered like heat lightning in past summers. Fair and
flitting like a summer cloud; — ^there is always some vapor
in the air, no matter how long the drought; there are even
April showers. Surely from time to time, for its vestiges never
depart, it floats through our atmosphere. It takes place, like

372 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a
law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and
familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. The
heart is forever inexperienced. They silently gather as by
magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like
the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days.
The Friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the
mariner in Pacific seas. Many are the dangers to be en-
countered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs, ere he may sail
before the constant trades. But who would not sail through
mutiny and storm even over Atlantic waves, to reach the
fabulous retreating shores of some continent man? The
imagination still clings to the faintest tradition of

THE ATLANTIDES

The smothered streams of love, which flow
More bright than Phlegethon, more low,
Island us ever, like the sea.

In an Atlantic mystery.

Our fabled shores none ever reach.

No mariner has found our beach,

Only our mirage now is seen,

And neighboring waves with floating green,
Yet still the oldest charts contain
Some dotted outline of our main ;

In ancient times midsummer days
Unto the western islands^ gaze,

To Teneriffe and the Azores,

Have shown our faint and cloud-like shores.

But sink not yet, ye desolate isles.

Anon your coast with commerce smiles,

And richer freights yell furnish far
Than Africa or Malabar,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 373
Be fair, be fertile evermore,

Ye rumored but untrodden shore,

Princes and monarchs will contend
Who first unto your land shall send,

And pawn the jewels of the crown
To call your distant soil their own.

Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mari-
ner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found
them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker
and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the
outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd
uninterrupted, and as it were in a straight line. —

Sea and land are but his neighbors.

And companions in his labors,

Who on the ocean’s verge and firm land’s end
Doth long and truly seek his Friends
Many men dwell far inland.

But he alone sits on the strand.

Whether he ponders men or books,

Always still he seaward looks.

Marine news he ever reads.

And the slightest glances heeds.

Feels the sea breeze on his cheek
At each word the landsmen speak,

In every companion’s eye
A sailing vessel doth descry;

In the ocean’s sullen roar
From some distant port he hears,

Of wrecks upon a distant shore,

And the ventures of past years.

Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of
Tadmore of the desert? There is on the earth no institution
which Friendship has established*, it is not taught by any

374 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple,
nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth
is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a
footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments
of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not
diverge ; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and
we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally,
though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly
foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness
and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that
there are many degress of warmth below blood heat, but
none of cold above it.

One or two persons come to my house from time to time,
there being proposed to them the faint possibility of inter-
course. They are as full as they are silent, and wait for my
plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre. If they could ever
come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground
they are dreaming of I They speak faintly, and do not ob-
trude themselves. They have heard some news, which none,
not even they themselves, can impart. It is a wealth they
bear about them which can be expended in various ways.
What came they out to seek?

No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship, and
indeed no thought is more familiar to their aspirations. All
men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a
tragedy, is enacted daily. It is the secret of the universe.
You may tread the town, you may wander the country, and
none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy
about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects
our behavior toward all new men and women, and a great
many old ones. Nevertheless, I can remember only two or
three essays on this subject in all literature. No wonder that
the Mythology, and Arabian Nights, and Shakespeare, and

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 375
Scott’s novels entertain us, — ^we are poets and fablers and
dramatists and novelists ourselves. We are continually act-
ing a part in a more interesting drama than any written. We
are dreaming that our Friends are our Friends, and that we
are our Friends’ Friends. Our actual Friends are but distant
relations of those to whom we are pledged. We never exchange
more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level
to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.
One goes forth prepared to say “Sweet Friends!” and the
salutation is “Damn your eyes!” But never mind; faint heart
never won true Friend. 0 my Friend, may it come to pass,
once, that when you are my Friend I may be yours.

Of what use the friendliest disposition even, if there are
no hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to
unimportant duties and relations? Friendship is first. Friend-
ship last. But it is equally impossible to forget our Friends,
and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say fare-
well, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How often
we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends,
that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. I would that I
were worthy to be any man’s Friend.

What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is
no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all,
love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made
seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for
one another. They are not often transfigured and translated
by love in each other’s presence. I do not observe them puri-
fied, refined, and elevated by the love of a man. If one abates
a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbor his vote at
town-meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon
frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of Friendship. Nor
do the farmers’ wives lead lives consecrated to Friendship. I
do not see the pair of farmer friends of either sex prepared
to stand against the world. There are only two or three couples
in history. To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly
no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most con-

376 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
template only what would be the accidental and trifling ad-
vantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time
of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; but
he who foresees such advantages in this relation proves him-
self blind to its real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced
in the relation itself. Such services are particular and menial,
compared with the perpetual and all-embracing service which
it is. Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical
kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not
live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do
not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies, — neighbors
are kind enough for that, — ^but to do the like office to our
spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed
they may be.

Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of
men. It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it
will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with
the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere
with the sincere, man with man. —

“Why love among the virtues is not known,

Is that love is them all contract in one.”

All the abuses which are the object of reform with the
philanthropist, the statesman, and the housekeeper, are un-
consciously amended in the intercourse of Friends. A Friend
is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting
from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.
It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to
hear. How can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and
stone? If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should
at last forget how to speak truth. In our daily intercourse
with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to
rust. None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness
from us. We ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt with
truly^ sincerely, nobly; but he answers no by his deafness. He

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 377
does not even hear this prayer. He says practically, — I will be
content if you treat me as no better than I should be, as de*'
ceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. For the most part, we
are contented so to deal and to be dealt with, and we do not
think that for the mass of men there is any truer and nobler
relation possible. A man may have good neighbors, so called,
and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents,
brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another
on this ground only. The State does not demand justice of
its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the
least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice ; and so
do the family and the neighborhood. What is commonly called
Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

But sometimes we are said to love another, that is to stand
in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and re-
ceive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth
there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and con-
fidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous,
and answer to our ideal. There are passages of affection in
our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no
prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly
life, and anticipate heaven for us. What is this Love that may
come right into the middle of a prosaic Goffstown day, equal
to any of the gods? that discovers a new world, fair and fresh
and eternal, occupying the place of this old one, when to the
common eye a dust has settled on the universe? which world
cannot else be reached, and does not exist. What other words,
we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated
than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they
were ever uttered. They are few and rare, indeed, but, like
a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated
by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco
which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat them
now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

The books for young people say a great deal about the
selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing

378 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to say about Friends, They mean associates and confidants
merely. “Know that the contrariety of foe and Friend pro-
ceeds from God.” Friendship takes place between those who
have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and
inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail. Even
speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it ; but it
follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth
into leaves till long after the graft has taken. It is a drama in
which the parties have no part to act. We are all Mussulmans
and fatalists in this respect. Impatient and uncertain lovers
think that they must say or do something kind whenever they
meet; they must never be cold. But they who are Friends do
not what they think they must, but what they must. Even
their Friendship is in one sense but a sublime phenomenon to
them.

The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend
in some such terms as these.

“I never asked thy leave to let me love thee, — I have a
right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which
is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love,
which 1 have found. O how I think of you! You are purely
good, — ^you are infinitely good. I can trust you forever. I
did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an oppor-
tunity to live.”

“You are the fact in a fiction, — you are the truth more
strange and admirable than fiction. Consent only to be what
you are. I alone will never stand in your way.”

‘This is what I would like, — to be as intimate with you as
our spirits are intimate, — respecting you as I respect my
ideal. Never to profane one another by word or action, even
by a thought. Between us, if necessary, let there be no ac-
quaintance.”

“I have discovered you; how can you be concealed from
me?”

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 379

The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will re-
ligiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of
him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each
other’s dreams.

Though the poet says, ’T is the preeminence of Friend-
ship to impute excellence,” yet we can never praise our Friend,
nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can
please us by any behavior y or ever treat us well enough. That
kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least
of all consist with this relation, and no such affront can be
offered to a Friend, as a conscious good-will, a friendliness
which is not a necessity of the Friend’s nature.

The sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one
another, by constant constitutional differences, and are most
commonly and surely the complements of one another. How
natural and easy it is for man to secure the attention of woman
to what interests himself. Men and women of equal culture,
thrown together, are sure to be of a certain value to one
another, more than men to men. There exists already a natural
disinterestedness and liberality in such society, and I think
that any man will more confidently carry his favorite books
to read to some circle of intelligent women, than to one of
his own sex. The visit of man to man is wont to be an inter-
ruption, but the sexes naturally expect one another. Yet
Friendship is no respecter of sex; and perhaps it is more rare
between the sexes, than between two of the same sex.

Friendship is, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. It
cannot well spare any outward sign of equal obligation and
advantage. The nobleman can never have a Friend among his
retainers, nor the king among his subjects. Not that the
parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all
that respects or affects their Friendship. The one’s love is
exactly balanced and represented by the other’s. Persons are
only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydro-
static paradox is the symbol of love’s law. It finds its level and

380 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
rises to its fountain-head in all breasts, and its slenderest
column balances the ocean. —

Love equals swift and slow,

And high and low.

Racer and lame.

The hunter and his game.

The one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other,
A hero’s love is as delicate as a maiden’s.

Confucius said, ^‘Never contract Friendship with a man
that is not better than thyself.” It is the merit and preserva-
tion of Friendship, that it takes place on a level higher than
the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant.
The rays of light come to us in such a curve that every man
whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. Such
foundation has civility. My Friend is that one whom I can
associate with my choicest thought. I always assign to him
a nobler employment in my absence than I ever find him en-
gaged in! and I imagine that the hours which he devotes to
me were snatched from a higher society. The sorest insult
which I ever received from a Friend was, when he behaved
with the license which only long and cheap acquaintance
allows to one’s faults, in my presence, without shame, and
still addressed me in friendly accents. Beware, lest thy Friend
learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle
be raised to the progress of thy love.

Friendship is never established as an understood relation.
Do you demand that I be less your Friend that you may know
it? Yet what right have I to think that another cherishes so
rare a sentiment foi me? It is a miracle which requires con-
stant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and
the rarest faith. It says by a silent but eloquent behavior, —
will be so related to thee as thou canst imagine; even so
thou mayest believe. I will spend truth, — all my wealth on
thee,” — and the Friend responds silently through his nature

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 38y
and life, and treats his Friend with the same divine courtesy.
He knows us literally through thick and thin. He never asks
for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by the features which
it naturally wears. We never need to stand upon ceremony
with him with regard to his visits. Wait not till I invite thee,
but observe that I am glad to see thee when thou comest. It
would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it. Where
my Friend lives there are all riches and every attraction, and
no slight obstacle can keep me from him. Let me never have
to tell thee what I have not to tell. Let our intercourse be
wholly above ourselves, and draw us up to it. The language
of Friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelligence
above language. One imagines endless conversations with his
Friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be
spoken without hesitancy, or end ; but the experience is com-
monly far otherwise. Acquaintances may come and go, and
have a word ready for every occasion ; but what puny word
shall he utter whose very breath is thought and meaning?
Suppose you go to bid farewell to your Friend who is setting
out on a journey; what other outward sign do you know of
than to shake his hand? Have you any palaver ready for
him then? any box of salve to commit to his pocket? any par-
ticular message to send by him? any statement which you had
forgotten to make? — as if you could forget anything. — ^No,
it is much that you take his hand and say Farewell; that you
could easily omit; so far custom has prevailed. It is even
painful, if he is to go, that he should linger so long. If he must
go, let him go quickly. Have you any last words? Alas, it is
only the word of words, which you have so long sought and
found not ; you have not a first word yet. There are few even
whom I should venture to call earnestly by their most proper
names. A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual
to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright,
he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of
hate. When it is durable * is serene and equable. Even it®

382 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are in-
deed lovers, though all would fain be. It is one proof of a
man’s fitness for Friendship that he is able to do without that
which is cheap and passionate. A true Friendship is as wise as
it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance
of their love, and know no other law nor kindness. It is not
extravagant and insane, but what it says is something estab-
.ished henceforth, and will bear to be stereotyped. It is a truer
truth, it is better and fairer news, and no time will ever shame
H, or prove it false. This is a plant which thrives best in a
temperate zone, where summer and winter alternate with
one another. The Friend is a necessarius, and meets his Friend
m homely ground; not on carpets and cushions, but on the
ground and on rocks they will sit, obeying the natural and
primitive laws. They will meet without any outcry, and part
without loud sorrow. Their relation implies such qualities as
the warrior prizes; for it takes a valor to open the hearts of
men as well as the gates of cities.

The Friendship which Wawatam testified for Henry the
fur-trader, as described in the latter’s “Adventures,” so
almost bare and leafless, yet not blossomless nor fruitless, is
remembered with satisfaction and security. The stern im-
perturbable warrior, after fasting, solitude, and mortification
of body, comes to the white man’s lodge, and affirms that he
is the white brother whom he saw in his dream, and adopts
h’m henceforth. He buries the hatchet as it regards his Friend,
and they hunt and feast and make maple-sugar together.
“Metals unite from fluxility; birds and beasts from motives
of convenience; fools from fear and stupidity; and just men
at sight.” If Wawatam would taste the “white man’s milk”
vith his tribe, or take his bowl of human broth made of the
rader’s fellow-countrymen, he first finds a place of safety for
lis Friend, whom he has rescued from a similar fate. At length,
after a long winter of undisturbed and happy intercourse in
the family of the chieftain in the wilderness, hunting and fish-
ing, they return in the spring to Michilimackinac to dispose

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 383
of their furs; and it becomes necessary for Wawatam to take
leave of his Friend at the Isle aux Outardes, when the latter,
to avoid his enemies, proceeded to the Saulte de Sainte
Marie, supposing that they were to be separated for a short
time only. ^ We now exchanged farewells,’' says Henry, “with
an emotion entirely reciprocal. I did not quit the lodge without
the most grateful sense of the many acts of goodness which
I had experienced in it, nor without the sincerest respect for the
virtues which I had witnessed among its members. All the
family accompanied me to the beach ; and the canoe had no
sooner put off than Wawatam commenced an address to the
Kichi Manito, beseeching him to take care of me, his bi other,
till we should next meet. — We had proceeded to too great a
distance to allow of our hearing his voice, before Wawatam
had ceased to offer up his prayers.” We never hear of him
again.

Friendship is not so kind as is imagined; it has not much
human blood in it, but consists with a certain disregard for
men and their erections, the Christian duties and humanities,
while it purifies the air like electricity. There may be the
sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually in-
nocent and true to their highest instincts. We may call it an
essentially heathenish intercourse, free and irresponsible in
its nature, and practising all the virtues gratuitously. It is
not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty society,
a fragmentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date, still
kept up at intervals, which, remembering itself, does not
hesitate to disregard the humbler rights and duties of hu-
manity, It requires immaculate and godlike qualities full-
grown, and exists at all only by condescension and anticipa-
tion of the remotest future. We love nothing which is merely
good and not fair, if such a thing is possible. Nature puts some
kind of blossom before every fruit, not simply a calyx behind
it. When the Friend comes out of his heathenism and supersti-
tion, and breaks his idols, being converted by the precepts of
a newer testament; when he forgets his mythology, and treats

384 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
his Friend like a Christian, or as he can afford, — then Friend-
ship ceases to be friendship, and becomes charity; that
principle which established the almshouse is now beginning
with its charity at home, and establishing an almshouse and
pauper relations there.

As for the number which this society admits, it is at any
rate to be begun with one, the noblest and greatest that we
know, and whether the world will ever carry it further,
whether, as Chaucer affirms,

‘There be mo sterres in the skie than a pair,’^
remains to be proved; —

“And certaine he is well begone
Among a thousand that findeth one.”

We shall not surrender ourselves heartily to any while we are
conscious that another is more deserving of our love. Yet
Friendship does not stand for numbers; the Friend does not
count his Friends on his fingers; they are not numerable. The
more there are included by this bond, if they are indeed in-
cluded, the rarer and diviner the quality of the love that
binds them. I am ready to believe that as private and inti-
mate a relation may exist by which three are embraced, as
between two. Indeed we cannot have too many friends; the
virtue which we appreciate we to some extent appropriate, so
that thus we are made at last more fit for every relation of
life. A base Friendship is of a narrowing and exclusive tend-
ency, but a noble one is not exclusive ; its very superfluity and
dispersed love is the humanity which sweetens society, and
sympathizes with foreign nations; for though its founda-
tions are private, it is in effect, a public affair and a public

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 38S
advantage, and the Friend, more than the father of a family^
deserves well of the state.

The only danger in Friendship is that it will end. It is a
delicate plant though a native. The least unworthiness, even
if it be unknown to one^s self, vitiates it. Let the Friend know
that those faults which he observes in his Friend his own
faults attract. There is no rule more invariable than that we
are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected. By
our narrowness and prejudices we say, I will have so much
and such of you, my Friend, no more. Perhaps there are none
charitable, none disinterested, none wise, noble, and heroic
enough, for a true and lasting Friendship.

I sometimes hear my Friends complain finely that I do
not appreciate their fineness. I shall not tell them whether
I do or not. As if they expected a vote of thanks for every fine
thing which they uttered or did. Who knows but it was finely
appreciated. It may be that your silence was the finest thing
of the two. There are some things which a man never speaks of,
which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest com-
munications we only lend a silent ear. Our finest relations are
not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive
depth of silence, never to be revealed. It may be that we are
not even yet acquainted. In human intercourse the tragedy
begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but
when silence is not understood. Then there can never be an
explanation. What avails it that another loves you, if he does
not understand you? Such love is a curse. What sort of com-
panions are they who are presuming always that their silence
is more expressive than yours? How foolish, and inconsid-
erate, and unjust, to conduct as if you were the only party
aggrieved! Has not your Friend always equal ground of com-
plaint? No doubt my Friends sometimes speak to me in vain,
but they do not know what things I hear which they are not
aware that they have spoken. I know that I have frequently

386 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
disappointed them by not giving them words when they ex-
pected them, or such as they expected. Whenever I see my
Friend I speak to him, but the expector, the man with the
ears, is not he. They will complain too that you are hard. O ye
that would have the cocoanut wrong side outwards, when
next I weep I will let you know. They ask for words and deeds,
when a true relation is word and deed. If they know not of
these things, how can they be informed? We often forbear to
confess our feelings, not from pride, but for fear that we
could not continue to love the one who required us to give
such proof of our affection.

I know a woman who possesses a restless and intelligent
mind, interested in her own culture and earnest to enjoy the
highest possible advantages,^ and I meet her with pleasure
as a natural person who not a little provokes me, and I sup-
pose is stimulated in turn by myself. Yet our acquaintance
plainly does not attain to that degree of confidence and senti-
ment which women, which all, in fact, covet. I am glad to
help her, as I am helped by her; I like very well to know her
with a sort of stranger’s privilege, and hesitate to visit her
often, like her other Friends. My nature pauses here, I do
not well know why. Perhaps she does not make the highest
demand on me, a religious demand. Some, with whose prej-
udices or peculiar bias I have no sympathy, yet inspire me
with confidence, and I trust that they confide in me also as
a religious heathen at least, — sl good Greek. I too have
principles as well founded as their own. If this person could
conceive that, without wilfulness, I associate with her as far
as our destinies are coincident, as far as our Good Geniuses
permit, and still value such intercourse, it would be a grate-
ful assurance to me. I feel as if I appeared careless, indiffer-
ent, and without principle to her, not expecting more, and
yet not content with less. If she could know that I make an
infinite demand on myself, as well as on all others, she would
see that this true though incomplete intercourse, is infinitely
better than a more unreserved but falsely grounded one,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 387
without the principle of growth in it. For a companion, I
require one who will make an equal demand on me with my
own genius. Such a one will always be rightly tolerant. It is
suicide and corrupts good manners to welcome any less than
this. I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration
rather than my performance. If you would not stop to look at
me, but look whither I am looking and further, then my educa-
tion could not dispense with your company.

My love must be as free
As is the eagle’s wing,

Hovering o’er land and sea
And everything.

I must not dim my eye
In thy saloon,

I must not leave my sky
And nightly moon.

Be not the fowler’s net
Which stays my flight.

And craftily is set
T’ allure the sight.

But be the favoring gale
That bears me on,

And still doth fill my sail
When thou art gone.

I cannot leave my sky
For thy caprice.

True love would soar as high
As heaven is.

The eagle would not brook
Her mate thus won,

388 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Who trained his eye to look
Beneath the sun.

Nothing is so difficult as to help a Friend in matters which
do not require the aid of Friendship, but only a cheap and
trivial service, if your Friendship wants the basis of a thor-
ough practical acquaintance. I stand in the friendliest rela-
tion, on social and spiritual grounds, to one who does nor
perceive what practical skill T have, but when he seeks my
assistance in such matters, is wholly ignorant of that one
whom he deals with; does not use my skill, which in such
matters is much greater than his, but only my hands. I know
anoiher who, on the contrary, is remarkable for his discrim-
ination in this respect; who knows how to make use of the
talents of others when he does not possess the same; knows
when not to look after or oversee, and stops short at his man.
[t is a rare pleasure to serve him, which all laborers know. I
am not a little pained by the other kind of treatment. It is as
if, after the friendliest and most ennobling intercourse, your
Friend should use you as a hammer and drive a nail with
your head, all in good faith; notwithstanding that you are
a tolerable carpenter, as well as his good Friend, and would
use a hammer cheerfully in his service. This want oi perception
is a defect which all the virtues of the heart cannot supply. —

The Good how can we trust?

Only the Wise are just.

The Good we use,

The Wise we cannot choose.

These there are none above;

The Good they know and love,

But are not known again
By those of lesser ken.

They do not charm us with their eyes,

But they transfix with their advice:

No partial sympathy they

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 389
With private woe or private weal.

But with the universe joy and sigh,

Whose knowledge is their sympathy.

Confucius said, ^^To contract ties of Friendship with any
one, is to contract Friendship with his virtue. There ought
not to be any other motive in Friendship.’’ But men wish us
to contract Friendship with their vice also. I have a Friend
who wishes me to see that to be right which I know to be
wrong. But if Friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to
darken the day, I will have none of it. It should be expansive
and inconceivably liberalizing in its effects. True Friendship
can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness
and ignorance. A want of discernment cannot be an ingredient
in it. If I can see my Friend’s virtues more distinctly than an-
other’s, his faults too are made more conspicuous by contrast.
We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend. Faults
are not the less faults because they are invariably balanced by
corresponding virtues, and for a fault there is no excuse,
though it may appear greater than it is in many ways. I have
never known one who could bear criticism, who could not be
flattered, who would not bribe his judge, or was content that
the truth should be loved always better than himself.

If two travellers would go their way harmoniously together,
the one must take as true and just a view of things as the
other, else their path will not be strewn with roses. Yet you
can travel profitably and pleasantly even with a blind man,
if he practises common courtesy, and when you converse
about the scenery will remember that he is blind but that you
can see; and you will not forget that his sense of hearing is
probably quickened by his want of sight. Otherwise you will
not long keep company. A blind man, and a man in whose eyes
there was no defect, were walking together, when they came
to the edge of a precipice.— “Take carel my friend,” said
the latter, “here is a steep precipice; go no further this way,”
— “I know better,” sftaid the other, and stepped off.

390 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our tiniest
Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than com-
plain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.
There is not so good an understanding between any two, but
the exposure by the one of a serious fault will produce a mis-
understanding in proportion to its heinousness. The constitu-
tional differences which always exist, and are obstacles to a
perfect Friendship, are forever a forbidden theme to the lips
of Friends. They advise by their whole behavior. Nothing can
reconcile them but love. They are fatally late when they un-
dertake to explain and treat with one another like foes. Who
will take an apology for a Friend? They must apologize like
dew and frost, which are off again with the sun, and which all
men know in their hearts to be beneficent. The necessity itself
for explanation, — what explanation will atone for that? True
love does not quarrel for slight reasons, such mistakes as mu-
tual acquaintances can explain away, but alas, however slight
the apparent cause, only for adequate and fatal and everlast-
ing reasons, which can never be set aside. Its quarrel, if there is
any, is ever recurring, notwithstanding the beams of affection
which invariably come to gild its tears ; as the rainbow, how-
ever beautiful and unerring a sign, does not promise fair
weather forever, but only for a season. 1 have known two or
three persons pretty well, and yet I have never known advice
to be of use but in trivial and transient matters. One may
know what another does not, but the utmost kindness cannot
impart what is requisite to make the advice useful. We must
accept or refuse one another as we are. I could tame a hyena
more easily than my Friend. He is a material which no tool of
mine will work. A naked savage will fell an oak with a fire-
brand, and wear a hatchet out of the rock by friction, but I
cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my
Friend, either to beautify or deform it.

The lover learns at last that there is no person quite trans-
4)arent and trastworthy, but every one has a devil in him that
capable cT any crime in the long run. Yet, as an oriental

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 591;
philosopher has said, “Although Friendship between good men
is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. The stalk of
the lotus may be broken, and the fibres remain connected.’’

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom
and skill without. There may be courtesy, there may be even
temper, and wit, and talent, and sparkling conversation, there
may be good-will even, — and yet the humanest and divinest
faculties pine for exercise. Our life without love is like coke
and ashes. Men may be pure as alabaster and Parian marble,
elegant as a Tuscan villa, sublime as Niagara, and yet if
there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertain-
ments, better is the hospitality of Goths and Vandals. My
Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh
of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother. I see his
nature groping yonder so like mine. We do not live far apart.
Have not the fates associated us in many ways? Is it of no
significance that we have so long partaken of the same loaf,
drank at the same fountain, breathed the same air, summer
and winter, felt the same heat and cold ; that the same fruits
have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have never had
a thought of different fibre the one from the other?

Nature doth have her dawn each day,

But mine are far between;

Content, I cry, for sooth to say,

Mine brightest are I ween.

For when my sun doth deign to rise,

Though it be her noontide,

Her fairest field in shadow lies,

Nor can my light abide.

Sometimes I bask me in her day^
Conversing with my mate,

392 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
But if we interchange one ray.

Forthwith her heats abate.

Through his discourse I climb and see.

As from some eastern hill,

A brighter morrow rise to me
Than lieth in her skill.

As ’t were two summer days in one,,

Two Sundays come together,

Our rays united make one sun.

With fairest summer weather.

As surely as the sunset in my latest November shall translate
me to the ethereal world, and remind nie of the ruddy morning
of youth ; as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my
decaying ear shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the
manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our
natural life, so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend,
and reflect a ray of God to me, and time shall foster and adorn
and consecrate our Friendship, no less than the ruins of
temples. As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming
stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and
summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

But all that can be said of Friendship, is like botany to
flowers. How can the understanding take account of its friend-
liness?

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their
lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the
rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals,
and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and
pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with
moss.

This to our cis- Alpine and cis-Atlantic Friends.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 393

Also this other word of entreaty and advice to the large
and respectable nation of Acquaintances, beyond the moun-
tains ; — Greeting.

My most serene and irresponsible neighbors, let us see that
we have the whole advantage of each other ; we will be useful,
at least, if not admirable, to one another. I know that the
mountains which separate us are high, and covered with per-
petual snow, but despair not. Improve the serene winter
weather to scale them. If need be, soften the rocks with
vinegar. For here lie the verdant plains of Italy ready to re-
ceive you. Nor shall I be slow on my side to penetrate to your
Provence. Strike then boldly at head or heart or any vital part.
Depend upon it the timber is well seasoned and tough, and will
bear rough usage; and if it shouldxrack, there is plenty more
where it came from. I am no piece of crockery that cannot be
jostled against my neighbor without danger of being broken
by the collision, and must needs ring false and jarringly to
the end of my clays, when once I am cracked; but rather one
of the old fashioned wooden trenchers, which one while stands
at the head of the table, and at another is a milking-stool, and
at another a seat for children, and finally goes down to its
grave not unadorned with honorable scars, and does not die
till it is worn out. Nothing can shock a brave man but dulness.
Think how many rebuffs every man has experienced in his
day; perhaps has fallen into a horse-pond, eaten fresh-water
clams, or worn one shirt for a week without washing. Indeed,
you cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity
for that which shocks you. Use me, then, for I am useful in
my way, and stand as one of many petitioners, from toadstool
and henbane up to dahlia and violet, supplicating to be put
to my use, if by any means ye may find me serviceable;
whether for a medicated drink or bath, as balm and lavender;
or for fragrance, as verbena and geranium; or for sight, as
cactus; or for thoughts, as pansy. — ^These humbler, at least, if
not those higher uses.

Ah my dear Strangers and Enemies, I would not forget you-

394 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
T can well afford to welcome you. Let me subscribe myself
Yours ever and truly — ^your much obliged servant. We have
nothing to fear from our foes; God keeps a standing army for
that service; but xvre have no ally against our Friends, those
ruthless Vandals.

Once more to one and all,

^Triends, Romans, Countrymen, and Lovers.”

Let such pure hate still underprop
Our love, that we may be
Each other’s conscience,

And have our sympathy
Mainly from thence.

Well one another treat like gods,

And all the faith we have
In virtue and in truth, bestow
On either, and suspicion leave
To gods below.

Two solitary stars —

Unmeasured systems far
Between us roll,

But by our conscious light we are
Determined to one pole.

What need confound the sphere? —

Love can afford to wait,

For it no hour’s too late
That witnesseth one duty’s end,

Or to another doth beginning lend.

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 395
It will subserve no use,

More than the tints of flowers,

Only the independent guest
Frequents its bowers,

Inherits its bequest.

No speech though kind has it,

But kinder silence doles
Unto its mates,

By night consoles.

By day congratulates.

What saith the tongue to tongue?

What heareth ear of ear?

By the decrees of fate
From year to year,

Does it communicate.

Pathless the gulf of feeling yawns — -
No trivial bridge of words,

Or arch of boldest span.

Can leap the moat that girds
The sincere man.

No show of bolts and bars
Can keep the foeman out,

Or ’scape his secret mine
Who entered with the doubt
That drew the line.

No warder at the gate
Can let the friendly in,

But, like the sun, o’er all
He will the castle win.

And shine along the wall.

396 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
There’s nothing in the world I know
That can escape from love,

For every depth it goes below,

And every height above.

It waits as waits the sky,

Until the clouds go by,

Yet shines serenely on
With an eternal day.

Alike when they are gone,

And when they stay.

Implacable is Love, —

Foes may be bought or teazed
From their hostile intent,

But he goes unappeased
Who is on kindness bent.

Having rowed five or six miles above Amoskeag before sun-
set, and reached a pleasant part of the river, one of us landed
to look for a farmhouse, where we might replenish our stores,
while the other remained cruising about the stream, and ex-
ploring the opposite shores to find a suitable harbor for the
night. In the meanwhile the canal boats began to come round
a point in our rear, poling their way along close to the shore,
the breeze having quite died away. This time there was no
offer of assistance, but one of the boatmen only called out to
say, as the truest revenge for having been the losers in the
race, that he had seen a wood-duck, which we had scared up,
sitting on a tall white-pine, half a mile down stream ; and he
repeated the assertion several times, and seemed really cha-
grined at the apparent suspicion with which this information
was received. But there sat the summer duck still undisturbed
by us.

By and by the other voyageur returned from his inland
expedition, bringing one of the natives with him, a little

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 397
flaxen-headed boy, with some tradition, or small edition, of
Robinson Crusoe in his head, who had been charmed by the
account of our adventures, and asked his father’s leave to join
us. He examined, at first from the top of the bank, our boat
and furniture, with sparkling eyes, and wished himself al-
ready his own man. He was a lively and interesting boy, and
we should have been glad to ship him; but Nathan was still
his father’s boy, and had not come to years of discretion.

We had got a loaf of home-made bread, and musk and water-
melons for dessert. For this farmer, a clever and well-disposed
man, cultivated a large patch of melons for the Hooksett and
Concord markets. He hospitably entertained us the next day,
exhibiting his hop-fields and kiln and melon patch, warning
us to step over the tight rope which surrounded the latter at a
foot from the ground, while he pointed to a little bower at
the corner, where it connected with the lock of a gun ranging
with the line, and where, as he informed us, he sometimes sat
in pleasant nights to defend his premises against thieves. We
stepped high over the line, and sympathized with our host’s,
on the whole quite human, if not humane, interest in the suc-
cess of his experiment. That night especially thieves were to be
expected, from rumors in the atmosphere, and the priming
was not wet. He was a Methodist man, who had his dwelling
between the river and Uncannunuc Mountain; who there be-
longed, and stayed at home there, and by the encouragement
of distant political organizations, and by his own tenacity,
held a property in his melons, and continued to plant. We
suggested melon seeds of new varieties and fruit of foreign
flavor to be added to his stock. We had come away up here
among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable benef-
icence of Nature. Strawberries and melons grow as well in
one man’s garden as another’s, and the sun lodges as kindly
under his hill-side, — when we had imagined that she inclined
rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know.

We found a convenient harbor for our boat on the opposite
or east shore, still in Hooksett, at the mouth of a sm< .11 brook

398 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
which emptied into the Merrimack, where it would be out
ol the way of any passing boat in the night, — for they com*
monly hug the shore if bound up stream, either to avoid the
current, or touch the bottom with their poles, — and where it
would be accessible without stepping on the clayey shore.
We set one of our largest melons to cool in the still water
among the alders at the mouth of this creek, but when our
tent was pitched and ready, and we went to get it, it had
floated out into the stream and was nowhere to be seen. So
taking the boat in the twilight, we went in pursuit of this
property, and at length, after long straining of the eyes, its
green disk was discovered far down the river, gently floating
seaward with many twigs and leaves from the mountains that
evening, and so perfectly balanced that it had not keeled at
all, and no water had run in at the tap which had been taken
out to hasten its cooling.

As we sat on the bank eating our supper, the clear light
of the western sky fell on the eastern trees and was reflected
in the water, and we enjoyed so serene an evening as left
nothing to describe. For the most part we think that there are
few degrees of sublimity, and that the highest is but little
higher than that which we now behold; but we are always
deceived. Sublimer visions appear, and the former pale and
fade away. We are grateful when we are reminded by interior
evidence, of the permanence of universal laws ; for our faith
is but faintly remembered, indeed, is not a remembered as-
surance, but a use and enjoyment of knowledge. It is when
we do not have to believe, but come into actual contact with
Truth, and are related to her in the most direct and intimate
way. Waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like
flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. In some
happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk
of our life, Syria and India stretch away from our present as
they do in history. All the events which make the annals of the
nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. Sud-
denly and silently the eras which we call history awake and

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 399
glimmer in us, and there is room for Alexander and Hannibal
to march and conquer. In other words, the history which we
read is only a fainter memory of events which have happened
in our own experience. Tradition is a more interrupted and
feebler memory.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations. I see men
with infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies,
what I, with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagi-
nation, — its capacities; for certainly there is a life of the
mind above the wants of the body and independent of it.
Often the body is warmed, but the imagination is torpid;
the body is fat, but the imagination is lean and shrunk.
But what avails all other wealth if this is wanting? ‘imagi-
nation is the air of mind,^^ in which it lives and breathes.
All things are as I am. Where is the House of Change? The
past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which
our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim
prospectus of our future field. Our circumstances answer to
our expectations and the demand of our natures. I have
noticed that if a man thinks that he needs a thousand dollars,
and cannot be convinced that he does not, he will commonly
be found to have them, if he lives and thinks a thousand dol-
lars will be forthcoming, though it be to buy shoe strings with.
A thousand mills will be just as slow to come to one who finds
it equally hard to convince himself that he needs them.

Men are by birth equal in this, that given

Themselves and their condition, they are even.

I am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance
of our lives. The miracle is, that what is is, when it is so
difficult, if not impossible, for anything else to be; that we
walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on
death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path;
that every man can get a living, and so few can do any more.
So much only can I accomplish ere health and strength are

400 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
gone, and yet this suffices. The bird now sits just out of gun-
shot. I am never rich in money, and I am never meanly poor.
If debts are incurred, why, debts are in the course of events
cancelled, as it were by the same law by which they were in-
curred. I heard that an engagement was entered into between
a certain youth and a maiden, and then I heard that it was
broken off, but I did not know the reason in either case. We
are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance,
now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there
were a fate in it and all things thwarted or assisted. I cannot
change my clothes but when I do, and yet I do change them,
and soil the new ones. It is wonderful that this gets done,
when some admirable deeds which I could mention do not get
done. Our particular lives seem of such fortune and confident
strength and durability as piers of solid rock thrown forward
into the tide of circumstance. When every other path would
fail, with singular and unerring confidence we advance on
our particular course. What risks we run I famine and fire and
pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, — and yet
every man lives till he — dies. How did he manage that? Is
there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when
we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, — we
have walked a plank all our lives up to this particular string-
piece where we are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being
matured still without delay, while I go about the streets and
chaffer with this man and that to secure a living. It is as in-
different and easy meanwhile as a poor man’s dog, and making
acquaintance with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a
mountain stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from
the sea at last. I have found all things thus far, persons and
inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to
my resources. No matter what imprudent haste in my career;
I am permitted to be rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling,
as if some unseen baggage train carried pontoons for my con-
venience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but
unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being car-

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 401
ried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and
llamas, whose keel shall plow its waves and bear me to the
Indies. Day would not dawn if it were not for

THE INWARD MORNING

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,

And in its fashion’s hourly change
It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad,

And can no difference find,

Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.

What is it gilds the trees and clouds,

And paints the heavens so gay.

But yonder fast abiding light
With its unchanging ray?

Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter’s morn.

Where’er his silent beams intrude
The murky night is gone.

How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come.

Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect’s noonday hum, —

Till the new light with morning cheer
From far streamed through the aisles.
And nimbly told the forest trees
For many stretching miles?

402 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Vve heard within my inmost soul
Such cheerful morning news,

In the horizon of my mind
Have seen such orient hues,

As in the twilight of the dawn.

When the first birds awake,

Are heard within some silent wood.

Where they the small twigs break,

Or in the eastern skies are seen,

Before the sun appears,

The harbingers of summer heats
Which from afar he bears.

Whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in
thin volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm
morning, perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the
brook to the swamp, and I float as high above the fields with
it. I can recall to mind the stillest summer hours, in which
the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor
in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can
laugh at any blow of fortune. For our lifetime the strains of a
harp are heard to swell and die alternately, and death is but
‘^the pause when the blast is recollecting itself.’’

We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of
the brook, in the angle formed by whose bank with the river
our tent was pitched, and there was a sort of human interest
in its story, which ceases not in freshet or in drought the live-
long summer, and the profounder lapse of the river was quite
drowned by its din. But the rill, whose

‘^Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 403
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams,
on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken
rockr :md the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up
no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast
a thousand contributary rills.

I dreamed his night of an event which had occurred long
before. It v/ „ a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased
to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But
in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his
suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had
never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably
soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams
we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed
to have the authority of a final judgment.

We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as
well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one

^Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely
less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our
conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the in^
tensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely
the degree by which this is separated from an actual un-
worthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have
been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt
could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness
has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it? In
dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real char-
acters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an un-
wavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most
fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful au-
thority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should
never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when
we are in dreams awake.

404 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAIT
^^And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,

A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,

Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.

No other noyse, nor people^s troublous cryes.

As still are wont t’ annoy the walled towne,

Might there be heard ; but careless Quiet lyes
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.^'

THURSDAY

^^He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath net shone.

Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear.

And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.

3|C JlC >|C 5jc S|C

Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;

There the red morning touched him with its light.

9|( :)c 3|c ){e

Go where he will, the wise man is at home.

His hearth the earth, — ^his hall the azure dome;

Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road,

By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.”

— Emerson

When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint deliberate
and ominous sound of rain drops on our cotton roof. The
rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept,
the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the
pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was
the trill of the tree-sparrow all the morning. The cheery
faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole
woodland quire besides. When we first stepped abroad, a

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 40S
flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a
ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unreserved frisk-
ing, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture
where they had spent the night, to taste the herbage by the
river-side; but when their leaders caught sight of our white
tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with
their fore feet braced, they sustained the rushing torrent in
their rear, and the whole flock stood still, endeavoring to solve
the mystery in their sheepish brains. At length, concluding
that it boded no mischief to them, they spread themselves
out quietly over the field. We learned afterward that we had
pitched our tent on the very spot which a few summers before
had been occupied by a party of Penobscots. We could see
rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence
called Hooksett Pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also
Uncannunuc Mountain, broad off on the west side of the
river.

This was the limit of our voyage, for a few hours more in
the rain would have taken us to the last of the locks, and
our boat was too heavy to be dragged around the long and
numerous rapids which would occur. On foot, however, we
continued up along the bank, feeling our way with a stick
through the showery and foggy day, and climbing ovei the
slippery logs in our path with as much pleasure and buoyancy
as in brightest sunshine; scenting the fragrance of the pines
and the wet clay under our feet, and cheered by the tones of
invisible waterfalls; with visions of toadstools, and wandering
frogs, and festoons of moss hanging from the spruce trees,
and thrushes flitting silent under the leaves; our road stiU
holding together through that wettest of weather, like faith,
while we confidently followed its lead. We managed to keep
our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet. It
was altogether a cloudy and drizzling day, with occasional
brightenings in the mist, when the trill of the tree-sparrow
seemed to be ushering in sunny hours.

“Nothing that naturally happens to man, can hurt him,

406 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
earthquakes and thundei;' storms not excepted,” said a man of
genius, who at this time lived a few miles further on our road.
When compelled by a shower to take shelter under a tree, we
may improve that opportunity for a more minute inspection
of some of Nature’s works. I have stood under a tree in the
woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer,
and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying
with microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the
leaves or the fungi at my feet. “Riches are the attendants of
the miser: and the heavens rain plenteously upon the moun-
tains.” I can fancy that it would be a luxury to stand up to
one’s chin in some retired swamp a whole summer day, scent-
ing the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and lulled by
the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes! A day passed in the
society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet
of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wet of
decayed cranberry vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-
beds. Say twelve hours of genial and familiar converse with
the leopard frog; the sun to rise behind alder and dogwood,
and climb buoyantly to his meridian of two hands’ breadth,
and finally sink to rest behind some bold western hummock.
To hear the evening chant of the mosquito from a thousand
green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some con-
cealed fort like a sunset gun! — Surely one may as profitably
be soaked in the juices of swamp for one day as pick his way
dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp, — are they not as rich
experience as warmth and dryness?

At present, the drops come trickling down the stubble
while we lie drenched on a bed of withered wild oats, by the
side of a bushy hill, and the gathering in of the clouds, with
the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the
regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, en-
hance the sense of inward comfort and sociableness. The
birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick
foliage, seemingly composing new strains upon their roosts
ugainst the sunshine. What were the amusements of the

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 407
drawing room and the library in comparison, if we had them
here? We should still sing as of old, —

My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read,

’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,

And will not mind to hit their proper targe.

Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too.

Our Shakespeare’s life was rich to live again;

What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,

Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,

What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,

If juster battles are enacted now

Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,

If red or black the gods will favor most,

Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,

Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,

For now I’ve business with this drop of dew,

And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower, —

I’ll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd’s-grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use,

A clover tuft is pillow for my head.

And violets quite overtop my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,

And gently swells the wind to say all’s well,

408 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,

Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats ;

But see that globe come rolling down its stem,

Now like a lonely planet there it floats,

And now it sinks into my garment’s hem.

Drip, drip the trees for all the country round,

And richness rare distills from every bough.

The wind alone it is makes every sound,

Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself,

Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so,

My dripping locks — they would become an elf,

Who in a beaded coat does gaily go.

The Pinnacle is a small wooded hill which rises very ab-
ruptly to the height of about two hundred feet, near the shore
at Hooksett Falls. As Uncannunuc Mountain is perhaps the
best point from which to view the valley of the Merrimack,
so this hill affords the best view of the river itself. I have sat
upon its summit, a precipitous rock only a few rods long, in
fairer weather, when the sun was setting and filling the river
valley with a flood of light. You can see up and down the Mer-
rimack several miles each way. The broad and straight river,
full of light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the
islet which divides the stream, the village of Hooksett on the
shore almost directly under your feet, so near that you can
converse with its inhabitants or throw a stone into its yards,
the woodland lake at its western base, and the mountains in
the north and northeast, make a scene of rare beauty and
completeness, which the traveller should take pains to behold.

We were hospitably entertained in Concord in New Hamp-
shire, which we persisted in calling New Concord, as we had

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 409
been wont, to distinguish it from our native town, from
which we had been told that it was named and in part origi-
nally settled. This would have been the proper place to con-
clude our voyage, uniting Concord with Concord by these
meandering rivers, but our boat was moored some miles below
its port.

The richness of the intervals at Penacook, now Concord in
New Hampshire, had been observed by explorers, and, ac-
cording to the historian of Haverhill, in the “year 1726,
considerable progress was made in the settlement, and a road
was cut through the wilderness from Haverhill to Penacook.
In the fall of 1727, the first family, that of Capt. Ebenezer
Eastman, moved into the place. His team was driven by
Jacob Shute, who was by birth a Frenchman, and he is said
to have been the first person who drove a team through the
wilderness. Soon after, says tradition, one Ayer, a lad of 18,
drove a team consisting of ten yoke of oxen to Penacook,
swam the river, and plowed a portion of the interval. He is
supposed to have been the first person who plowed land in
that place. After he had completed his work, he started on
his return at sunrise, drowned a yoke of oxen while recross-
ing the river, and arrived at Haverhill about midnight. The
crank of the first saw-mill was manufactured in Haverhill,
and carried to Penacook on a horse.^^

But we found that the frontiers were not this way any
longer. This generation has come into the world fatally late
for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things,
men have been there before us. We cannot now have the pleas-
ure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the
suburbs of Astoria city, and our boundaries have literally been
run to the South Sea, according to the old patents. But the
lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range^
are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a western orator
said, “men generally live over about the same surface; some
live long and narrow, and others live broad and short;’’ but
it is all superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a

m THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all
their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward
to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by
rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes
drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers
are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts
a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled
wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the
setting sun, or, further still, between him and it. Let him
build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronts
ing IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy
years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come
between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.

We now no longer sailed or floated on the river, but trod
the unyielding land like pilgrims. Sadi tells who may travel;
among others, — common mechanic, who can earn a sub-
sistence by the industry of his hand, and shall not have to
stake his reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers
have said.” — He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits
and game of the most cultivated country. A man may travel
fast enough and earn his living on the road. I have frequently
been applied to to do work when on a journey; to do tinker-
ing and repair clocks, when I had a knapsack on my back. A
man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions
and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting the window
of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other
passengers had failed. ^^Hast thou not heard of a Sufi, who was
hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal ; an officer
of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, come along and shoe
my horse.” Farmers have asked me to assist them in haying,
when I was passing their fields. A man once applied to me to
mend his umbrella, taking me for an umbrella mender, be-
cause, being on a journey, I carried an umbrella in my hand
while the sun shone. Another wished to buy a tin cup of me,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 411
observing that I had one strapped to my belt, and a sauce-pan
on my back. The cheapest way to travel, and the way to
travel the furthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot,
carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal,
some salt, and some sugar. When you come to a brook or
pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a
hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s
house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses
the road, and dip into it your sugar, —this alone wih last you
a whole day; — or, if you are accustomed to heartier livmg,
you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread
or cold pudding into it, and eat it with your own spoon out
of your own dish. Any one of these things I mean, not all
together. I have travelled thus some hundreds of miles without
taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when con-
venient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more
profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired
why it would not be best to travel always. But I never thought
of travelling simply as a means of getting a livelihood. A
simple woman down in T 3 mgsboro’, at whose house I once
stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing
the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the
same purpose, asked if I was not a traveller, supposing that
I had been travelling ever since, and had now come round
again, that travelling was one of the professions, more or less
productive, which her husband did not follow. But continued
travelling is far from productive. It begins with wearing
away the soles of the shoes, and making the fe^"^: sore, and ere
long it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore
into the bargain. I have observed that the after-life of those
who have travelled much is very pathetic. True and sincere
travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or
any other part of the human journey, and it requires a long
probation to be broken into it. I do not speak of those that
travel sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dan-
gling the while, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than

412 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
when we speak of setting hens we mean those that sit stand-
ing, but I mean those to whom travelling is life for the legs.
The traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a pass-
port from the elements, the principal powers that be for him.
He shall experience at last that old threat of his mother ful-
filled, that he shall be skinned alive. His sores shall gradually
deepen themselves that they may heal inwardly, while he gives
no rest to the sole ot his foot, and at night weariness must be
his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his
rainy days. — So was it with us.

Sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout-
fishers from distant cities had arrived before us, and where,
to our astonishment, the settlers dropped in at night-fall to
have a chat and hear the news, though there was but one
road, and no other house was visible, — as if they had come
out of the earth. There we sometimes read old newspapers,
who never before read new ones, and in tjie rustle of their
leaves heard the dashing of the surf along the Atlantic shore,
instead of the sough of the wind among the pines. But then
walking had given us an appetite even for the least palatable
and nutritious food.

We had already passed by broad daylight the scene of
our encampment at Coos Falls, and at length we pitched our
camp on the west bank, in the northern part of Merrimack,
nearly opposite to the large island on which we had spent
the noon in our way up the river.

There we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping
shelf in the bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was
drawn up on the sand, and just behind a thin fringe of oaks
which bordered the river ; without having disturbed any in-
habitants but the spiders in the grass, which came out by the
light of our lamp and crawled over our buffaloes. Whep we
looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly
through the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 413
seemed to rejoice in the night, and with the damp air we in-
haled a solid fragrance. Having eaten our supper of hot cocoa
and bread and watermelon, we soon grew weary of conversing
and writing in our journals, and putting out the lantern which
hung from the tent pole, fell asleep.

Unfortunately many things have been omitted which should
have been recorded in our journal, for though we made it a
rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolu-
tion is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely
allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent
things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. It is
not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time,
because to write it is not what interests us.

Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dream?
with half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval,
when the wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the cur-
tains of the tent, and causing its cords to vibrate, that we
remembered that we lay on the bank of the Merrimack, and
not in our chamber at home. With our heads so low in the
grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, end lapsing
downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling
louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only
a slight limpid trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung
a leak, and the water were flowing into the grass by our side.
The wind, rustling the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a
wakeful and inconsiderate person up at midnight, moving
about and putting things to rights, occasionally stirring up
whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. There seemed to be a
great haste and preparation throughout Nature, as for a
distinguished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the
night, by a thousand hand-maidens, and a thousand pots to
be boiled for the next day’s feasting; — such a whispering
bustle, as if ten thousand fairies made their fingers fly, silently
sewing at the new carpet with which the earth was to be
clothed, and the new drapery which was to adorn the trees.

414 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
And then the wind would lull and die away and we like it
fell asleep again.

FRIDAY

“The Boteman strayt

Held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse,

Ne ever shronckr?, ne ever sought to bayt
His tryed armes tor toylesome wearinesse;

But with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse.*'

— Spenser

“Summer’s robe grows

Dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows.”

— Donne

As we lay awake long before daybreak, listening to the
rippling of the river and the rustling of the leaves, in suspense
whether the wind blew up or down the stream, was favorable
or unfavorable to our voyage, we already suspected that there
was a change in the weather, from a freshness as of autumn
fin these sounds. The wind in the woods sounded like an in-
cessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even
felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. He
who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will
not utterly despair. That night was the turning point in the
season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in
autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimagi-
nable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.

We found our boat in the dawn just as we had left it, and
as if waiting for us, there on the shore, in autumn, all cool
and dripping with dew, and our tracks still fresh in the wet
sand around it, the fairies all gone or concealed. Before five
o’clock we pushed it into the fog, and leaping in, at one shove
were out of sight of the shores, and began to sweep down-
ward with the rushing river, keeping a sharp look out for
rocks. We could see only the yellow gurgling water, and a

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 415
solid bank of fog on every side forming a small yard around
us. We soon passed the mouth of the Souhegan and the
village of Merrimack, and as the mist gradually rolled away,
and we were relieved from the trouble of watching for rocks,
we saw by the flitting clouds, by the first russet tinge on the
hills, by the rushing river, the cottages on shore, and the shore
itself, so coolly fresh and shining with dew, and later in the
day, by the hue of the grape vine, the goldfinch on the willow,
the flickers flying in flocks, and when we passed near enough
to the shore, as we fancied, by the faces of men, that the Fall
had commenced. The cottages looked more snug and com-
fortable, and their inhabitants were seen only for a moment,
and then went quietly in and shut the door, retreating inward
to the haunts of summer.

^^And now the cold autumnal dews are seen
To cobweb ev^ry green ;

And by the low-shorn rowens doth appear
The fast declining year.’^

We heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and even the
water had acquired a grayer hue. The sumach, grape, and
maple were already changed, and the milkweed had turned
to a deep rich yellow. In all woods the leaves were fast ripen-
ing for their fall; for their full veins and lively gloss mark
the ripe leaf, and not the sered one of the poets; and we
knew that the maples, stripped of their leaves among the
earliest, would soon stand like a wreath of smoke along the
edge of the meadow. Already the cattle were heard to low
wildly in the pastures and along the highways, restlessly
running to and fro, as if in apprehension of the withering of
the grass and of the approach of winter. Our thoughts too
began to rustle.

As I pass along the streets of our village of Concord on
the day of our annual Cattle Show, when it usually happens
that the leaves of the elms and buttonwoods begin first to

416 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
strew the ground under the breath of the October wind, the
lively spirits in their sap seem to mount as high as any plow-
boy ^s let loose that day; and they lead my thoughts away to
the rustling woods, where the trees are preparing for their
winter campaign. This autumnal festival, when men are
gathered in crowds in the streets as regularly and by as natural
a law as the leaves cluster and rustle by the wayside, is nat-
urally associated in my mind with the fall of the year. The
low of cattle in the streets sounds like a hoarse symphony
or running base to the rustling of the leaves. The wind goes
hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is
left in the fields, while every farmer lad too appears to scud
before it, — having donned his best pea jacket and pepper-and-
salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of
duck, or kersymere, or corduroy, and his furry hat withal, —
to country fairs and cattle shows, to that Rome among the
villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All the
land over they go leaping the fences with their tough idle
palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid
the low of calves and the bleating of sheep, — Amos, Abner,
Elnathan, Elbridge, —

‘Trom steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.’’

I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them, with
their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from
spectacle to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be
time between =un and sun to see them all, and the sun does
not wait more than in haying time.

“Wise nature’s darlings, they live in the world
Perplexing not themselves how it is hurled.”

Running hither and thither with appetite for the coarse
pastimes of the day, now with boisterous speed at the heels
of the inspired negro from whose larynx the melodies of al}

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 417
Congo and Guinea coast have broke loose into our streets;
now to see the procession of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as
august and grave as Osiris, or the droves of neat cattle and
milch cows as unspotted as Isis or lo. Such as had no love
for Nature

^‘at all,

Came lovers home from this great festival.”

They may bring their fattest cattle and richest fruits to the
fair, but they are all eclipsed by the show of men. These
are stirring autumn days, when men sweep by in crowds,
amid the rustle of leaves, like migrating finches; this is the
true harvest of the year, when the air is but the breath of
men, and the rustling of leaves is as the trampling of the
crowd. We read now-a-days of the ancient festivals, games,
and processions of the Greeks and Etruscans, with a little
incredulity, or at least with little sympathy ; but how natural
and irrepressible in every people is some heart}’' and palpable
greeting of Nature. The Corybantes, the Bacchantes, the
rude primitive tragedians with their procession and goat-
song, and the whole paraphernalia of the Panathensea, which
appear so antiquated and peculiar, have their parallel now.
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar
is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives,
while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating
it. The farmers crowd to the fair to-day in obedience to the
same ancient law which Solon or Lycurgus did not enact,
as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.

It is worth the while to see the country’s people, how they
pour into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their
very shirt and coat collars pointing forward, — collars so
broad as if they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for
the fashions always tend to superfluity, — ^and with an unusua’
springiness in their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another.
The more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least

418 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear,
and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an
ever shabby coat, though finer than the farmer’s best, yet
never dressed ; come to see the sport, and have a hand in what
is going, — to know “what’s the row,”’ if there is any; to be
where some men are drunk, some horses race, some cockerels
fight; anxious to be shaking props under a table, and above
all to see the “striped pig.” He especially is the creature of
the occasion. He empties both his pockets and his character
into the stream, and swims in such a day. He dearly loves
the social slush. There is no reserve of soberness in him.

I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse
and succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of
vegetables. Though there are many crooked and crabbed
specimens of humanity among them, run all to thorn and rind,
and crowded out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the
third chestnut in the bur, so that you wonder to see some
heads wear a whole hat, yet fear not that the race will fail
or waiver in them; like the crabs which grow in hedges, they
furnish the stocks of sweet and thrifty fruits still. Thus is
nature recruited from age to age, while the fair and palatable
varieties die out and have their period. This is that mankind.
How cheap must be the material of which so many are made.

The wind blew steadily down the stream, so that we kept
our sails set, and lost not a moment of the forenoon by de-
lays, but from early morning until noon, were continually
dropping downward. With our hands on the steering paddle,
which was thrust deep into the river, or bending to the oar,
which indeed we rarely relinquished, we felt each palpitation
in the veins of our steed, and each impulse of the wings which
drew us above. The current of our thoughts made as sudden
bends as the river, which was continually opening new pros-
pects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow
most rapidly and shallowest at these points. The steadfast

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 419
shores never once turned aside for us, but still trended as they
were made; why then should we always turn aside for them?

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It re-
quires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world
demands or can appreciate. These winged thoughts are like
birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you
touch them like quadrupeds. Nothing was ever so unfamiliar
and startling to a man as his own thoughts.

To the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb
and conform to the ways of the world. Genius is the worst
of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popu-
larity. The bird of paradise is obliged constantly to fly against
the wind, lest its gay trappings, pressing close to its body, may
impede its free movements.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points
of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest
obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind
changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow
from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which
they can never reach.

The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires
peculiar institutions and edicts for his defence, but the tough-
est son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength
and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the
God in him. It is the worshippers of beauty, after all, who
have done the real pioneer work of the world.

The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults,
and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the
head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He
makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to
offer one the freedom of a city.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame
among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly
fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Orpheus does not hear the strains which issue from his
lyre, but only those which are breathed into it ; for the original

420 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
strain precedes the sound, by as much as the echo follows
after; the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and
beasts.

When 1 stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of
the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated,
and not truly cumulative treasure, where immortal works
stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive
their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread
from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded
of what poetry is, I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did
not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas I that
so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a
dust-hole!

The poet will write for his peers alone. Ke will remember
only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and
expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the
same field as freely.

We are often prompted to speak our thoughts to our neigh-
bors, or the single travellers whom we meet on the road, but
poetry is a communication from our home and solitude ad-
dressed to all Intelligence. It never whispers in a private ear.
Knowing this, we may understand those sonnets said to be
addressed to particular persons, or ‘To a Mistress^ Eyebrow.”
Let none feel flattered by them. For poetry write love, and
it will be equally true.

No doubt it is an important difference between men of
genius or poets, and men not of genius, that the latter are
unable to grasp and confront the thought which visits them.
But it is because it is too faint for expression, or even con-
scious impression. What merely quickens or retards the blood
in their veins and fills their afternoons with pleasure they
know not whence, conveys a distinct assurance to the finer
organization of the poet.

We talk of genius as if it were a mere knack, and the poet
could only express what other men conceived. But in com-
parison with his task the poet is the least talented of any;

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 421
the writer of prose has more skill. See what talent the smith
has. His material is pliant in his hands. When the poet is
most inspired, is stimulated by an aura which never even
colors the afternoons of common men, then his talent is all
gone, and he is no longer a poet. The gods do not grant him
any skill more than another. They never put their gifts into
his hands, but they encompass and sustain him with their
breath.

To say that God has given a man many and great talents,
frequently means, that he has brought his heavens down
within reach of his hands.

When the poetic frenzy seizes us, we run and scratch with
our pen, intent only on worms, calling our mates around us,
like the cock, and delighting in the dust we make, but do not
detect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, we have in the
meantime cast to a distance, or quite covered up again.

The poet’s body even is not fed simply like other men’s,
but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia
of the gods, and lives a divine life. By the healthful and in-
vigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene
old age.

Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and
sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil
gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters
his verse must be that by which he lives.

Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more
than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level
height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought.
The poet often only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and
is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer
has conquered like a Roman, and settled colonies.

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is
always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the
production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what
he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed
in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far

422 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist
His true work will not stand in any princess gallery.

My life has been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and utter it.

THE FOETUS DELAY

In vain I see the morning rise,

In vain observe the western blaze,
Who idly look to other skies,

Expecting life by other ways.

Amidst such boundless wealth without,
I only still am poor within.

The birds have sung their summer out.
But still my spring does not begin.

Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
Compelled to seek a milder day.

And leave no curious nest behind,

No woods still echoing to my lay?

We endeavored in vain to persuade the wind to blow through
the long corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight
through the woods, and were obliged to resort to our old ex-
pedient of drawing by a cord. When we reached the Concord,
we were forced to row once more in good earnest, with neither
wind nor current in our favor, but by this time the rawness
of the day had disappeared, and we experienced the warmth
of a summer afternoon. This change in the weather was
favorable to our contemplative mood, and disposed us to
dream yet deeper at our oars, while we floated in imagination
further down the stream of time, as we had floated down the

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 423
stream of the Merrimack, to poets of a milder period than
had engaged us in the morning. Chelmsford and Billerica ap-
peared like old English towns, compared with Merrimack
and Nashua, and many generations of civil poets might liave
lived and sung here.

What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of
Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and
Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray. Our
summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it,
seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden with the fruit
and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but
soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shad-
ing leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs
to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of ages.
We cannot escape the impression that the Muse has stooped
a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized
eras. Now first we hear of various ages and styles of poetry;
it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic; but the
poetry of runic monuments is of one style, and for every age.
The bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacred-
ness of his office. Formerly he was called a seer, but now it
is thought that one man sees as much as another. He has no
longer the bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which
he formerly stood ready to perform. Hosts of warriors earnest
for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient
bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of the fight. There
was no danger of his being overlooked by his contemporaries.
But now the hero and the bard are of different professions.
When we come to the pleasant English verse, the storms have
all cleared away, and it will never thunder and lighten more.
The poet has come within doors, and exchanged the forest
and crag for the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and Stonehenge
with its circles of stones, for the house of the Englishman. No
hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song or

m THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
heroic action, but a homely Englishman, who cultivates the
art of poetry. We see the comfortable fireside, and hear the
crackling fagots in all the verse.

Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the
many social and domestic comforts which we meet with in
his verse, we have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider
him, as if he occupied less space in the landscape, and did
not stretch over hill and valley as Ossian does. Yet, seen from
the side of posterity, as the father of English poetry, preceded
by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any
strain of pure melody, we easily come to reverence him. Pass-
ing over the earlier continental poets, since we are bound to
the pleasant archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer’s is the
first name after that misty weather in which Ossian lived,
which can detain us long. Indeed, though he represents so
different a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many
respects the Homer of the English poets. Perhaps he is the
youthfulest of them all. We return to him as to the purest
well, the fountain furthest removed from the highway of
desultory life. He is so natural and cheerful, compared with
later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personifica-
tion of spring. To the faithful reader his muse has even given
an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing him,
they seem related to the golden age. It is still the poetry of
youth and life, rather than of thought ; and though the moral
vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet banished the sun
and daylight from his verse. The loftiest strains of the muse
are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive, and not a carol
as free as nature^s. The content which the sun shines to cele-
brate from morning to evening, is unsung. The muse solaces
herself, and is not ravished but consoled. There is a catastrophe
implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and less of the
lark and morning dews, than of the nightingale and evening
shades. But in Homer and Chaucer there is more of the in-
nocence and serenity of youth, than in the more modern and
moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading,

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 42S
and men cling to this old song, because they still have mo-
ments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them
an appetite for more. To the innocent there are neither cher-
ubim nor angels. At rare intervals we rise above the necessity
of virtue into an unchangeable morning light, in which wf^
have only to live right oc and breathe the ambrosial air. The
Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a
rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on
native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and a
scliolar. There were never any times so stirring that there
were not to be found some sedentary still. He was surrounded
by the din of arms. The battles of Halidon Hill and Neville’s
Cross, and the still more memorable battles of Cressy and
Poictiers, were fought in his youth; but these did not concern
our poet much, Wickliffe and his reform much more. He re-
garded himself always as one privileged to sit and converse
with books. He helped to establish the literary class. His
character as one of the fathers of the English language, would
alone make his works important, even those which have little
poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring
his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected
by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a
literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that
which Dante rendered to Italy. If Greek sufficeth for Greek,
and Arabic for Arabian, and Hebrew for Jew, and Latin for
Latin, then English shall suffice for him, for any of these will
serve to teach truth ^^right as divers pathes leaden divers folke
the right waye to Rome.” In the Testament of Love he writes,
^Xet then clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the prop-
ertie of science, and the knowinge in that facultie, and lette
Frenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their queinte termes,
for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fan-
tasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dame’s tonge.”

He will know how to appreciate Chaucer best, who has
come down to him the natural way, through the meagre pas-

426 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
tures of Saxon and ante-Chaucerian poetry; and yet, so
human and wise he appears after such diet, that we are
liable to misjudge him still. In the Saxon poetry extant, in
the earliest English, and the contemporary Scottish poetry,
there is less to remind the reader of the rudeness and vigor
of youth, than of the feebleness of a declining age. It is for
the most part translation or imitation merely, with only an
occasional and sligiit tinge of poetry, oftentimes the false-
hood and exaggeration of fable, without its imagination to
redeem it, and we look in vain to find antiquity restored,
humanized, and made blithe again by some natural sympathy
between it and the present. But Chaucer is fresh and modern
still, and no dust settles on his true passages. It lightens along
the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and
birds sung, and hearts beaten, in Englana. Before the earnest
gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop
off, and the original green life is revealed. He was a homely
and domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do.

There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, and
we find that in Chaucer. We can expand at last in his breath,
and we think that we could have been that man’s acquaint-
ance. He was worthy to be a citizen of England, while Pe-
trarch and Boccaccio lived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane
in Switzerland and in Asia, and Bruce in Scotland, and Wick-
liffe, and Gower, and Edward the Third, and John of Gaunt,
and the Black Prince, were his own countrymen as well as
contemporaries; all stout and stirring names. The fame of
Roger Bacon came down from the preceding century, and the
name of Dante still possessed the influence of a living pres-
ence. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his
reputation, and not a little Pke Homer and Shakespeare, for
he would have held up his head in their company. Among
e^irly Endish poets he is the landlord and host, and has the
authority of such. The affectionate mention which succeeding
early poets make of him, coupling him with Homer and Virgil,
is to be taken into the account in estimating his character and

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 427
influence. King James and Dunbar of Scotland speak of him
with more love and reverence than any modern author of his
predecessors of the past century. The same childlike relation
is without a parallel now. For the most part we read him
without criticism, for he does not plead his own case, but
speaks for his readers, and has that greatness of trust and
reliance which compels popularity. He confides in the reader,
and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. And in
return the reader has great confidence in him, that he tells
no lies, and reads his story with inaulgence, as if it were the
circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards that
he has spoken with more directness and economy of words
than a sage. He is never heartless,

“For first the thing is thought within the hart,

Er any word out from the mouth astart.”

And so new was all his theme in those days, that he did not
have to invent, but only to tell.

We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit. The easy
height he speaks from in his Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales, as if he were equal to any of the company there assem-
bled, is as good as any particular excellence in it. But though it
is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent
poetry. For picturesque descriptions of persons it is, perhaps,
without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially hu-
morous, as the loftiest genius never is. Humor, however broad
and genial, takes a narrower view than enthusiasm. To his own
finer vein he added all the common wit and wisdom of his
time, and everywhere in his works his remarkable knowledge
of the world and nice perception of character, his rare com-
mon sense and proverbial wisdom, are apparent. His genius
does not soar like Milton^s, but is genial and familiar. It shows
great tenderness and delicacy, but not the heroic sentiment. It
is only a greater portion of humanity with all its weakness.
He is not heroic, as Raleigh, nor pious, as Herbert, nor philo-

428 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
sophical, as Shakespeare, but he is the child of the English
muse, that child which is the father of the man. The charm
of his poetry consists often only in an exceeding naturalness,
perfect sincerity, with the behavior of a child rather than of
a man.

Gentleness and delicacy of character are everywhere ap-
parent in his verse. The simplest and humblest words come
readily to his lips. No one can read the Prioress^ tale, under-
standing the spirit in which it was written, and in which the
child sings O alma redemptoris mater, or the account of the
departure of Constance with her child upon the sea, in the
Man of Lawe’s tale, without feeling the native innocence and
refinement of the author. Nor can we be mistaken respecting
the essential purity of his character, disregarding the apology
of the manners of the age. A simple pathos and feminine
gentleness, which Wordsworth only occasionally approaches,
but does not equal, are peculiar to him. We are tempted to
say that his genius was feminine, not masculine. It was such
a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in woman, though
not the appreciation of it; perhaps it is not to be found at aP
in woman, but is only the feminine in man.

Sure pure, and genuine, and childlike love of Nature is
hardly to be found in any poet.

Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character
appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner
of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought without
any false reverence, and with no more parade than the
zephyr to his ear. If Nature is our mother, then God is
our father. There is less love and simple practical trust in
Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue
do we find expressed any affection for God. Certainly, there
is no sentiment sc rare as the love of God. Herbert almost
alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!” Our poet uses similar
words with propriety, and whenever he sees a beautiful person,
or other object, prides himself on the “maistry” of his God.
He even recommends Dido to be his bride, —

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 429
that God that heaven and yearth made,

Would have a love for beauty and goodnesse,

And womanhede, trouth, and semeliness/^

But in justification of our praise, we must refer to his
works themselves; to the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,
the account of Gentilesse, the Flower and the Leaf, the stories
of Griselda, Virginia, Ariadne, and Blanche the Duchesse, and
much more of less distinguished merit. There are many poets
of more taste and better manners, who knew how to leave out
their dulness, but such negative genius cannot detain us long ;
we shall return to Chaucer still with love. Some natures which
are really rude and ill developed, have yet a higher standard
of perfection than others which are refined and well balanced.
Even the clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards
them, are higher and purer than those which the artist obeys.
If we have to wander through many dull and prosaic passages
in Chaucer, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that
it is not an artificial dulness, but too easily matched by many
passages in life. We confess that we feel a disposition com-
monly to concentrate sweets, and accumulate pleasures, but
the poet may be presumed always to speak as a traveller, who
leads us through a varied scenery, from one eminence to an-
other, and it is, perhaps, more pleasing, after all, to meet with
a fine thought in its natural setting. Surely fate has enshrined
it in these circumstances for some end. Nature strews her nuts
and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps.
This was the soil it grew in, and this the hour it bloomed in;
if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand the
flower, shall not we come here to pluck it?

A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous
expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere
which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely,
and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger, but
true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breatci
of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance.

430 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no char-
acter. It is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech,
as if its author had taken, not an intoxicating draught, but
an electuary. It has the distinct outline of sculpture, and
chronicles an early hour. Under the , influence of passion all
men sneak thus distinctly, but wrath is not always divine.

There are two classes of men called poets. The one culti-
vates life, the other art, — one seeks food for nutriment, the
other for flavor ; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the
palate. There are two kinds of writing, both great and rare ;
one that of genius, or the inspired, the other of intellect and
taste, in the intervals of inspiration. The former is above
criticism, always correct, giving the law to criticism. It vibrates
and pulsates with life forever. It is sacred, and to be read
with reverence, as the works of nature are studied. There are
few instances of a sustained style of this kind; perhaps every
man has spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of
the record. Such a style removes us out of personal relations
with its author, we do not take his words on our lips, but his
sense into our hearts. It is the stream of inspiration, which
bubbles out, now here, now there, now in this man,
now in that. It matters not through what ice-crystals
it is seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream running
under ground. It is in Shakespeare, Alpheus, in Burns
Arethuse ; but ever the same. — ^The other is self-possessed and
wise. It is reverent of genius, and greedy of inspiration. It is
conscious in the highest and the least degree. It consists with
the most perfect command of the faculties. It dwells in a
repose as of the desert, and objects are as distinct in it as oases
or palms in the horizon of sand. The train of thought moves
with subdued and measured step, like a caravan. But the pen
is only an instrument in its hand, and not instinct with life,
like a longer arm. It leaves a thin varnish or glaze over all
its work. The works of Goethe furnish remarkable instances
of the latter.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet. Nothing is

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 431
considered simply as it lies in the lap of eternal beauty, but
our thoughts, as well as our bodies, must be dressed after
the latest fashions. Our taste is too delicate and particular.
It says nay to the poet^s work, but never yea to his hope.
It invites him to adorn his deformities, and not to cast them
off by expansion, as the tree its bark. We are a people who
live in a bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and
drink only light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by
the least natural sour. If we had been consulted, the back-
bone of the earth would have been made, not of granite,
but of Bristol spar. A modern author would have died in
infancy in a ruder age. But the poet is something more than
a scald, ^'a smoother and polisher of language;’^ he is a Cin-
cinnatus in literature, and occupies no west end of the world.
Like the sun, he will indifferently select his rhymes, and with
a liberal taste weave into his verse the planet and the stubble.

In these old books the stucco has long since crumbled away,
and we read what was sculptured in the granite. They are
rude and massive in their proportions, rather than smooth and
delicate in their finish. The workers in stone polish only their
chimney ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done.
There is a soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite,
which addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits
only the ball of the eye. The true finish is the work of time
and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still
polishing the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can
do no more. A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first,
because it anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained
polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an
essential quality of its substance. Its beauty is at the same
time its strength, and it breaks with a lustre.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well
as its essence. The reader easily goes within the shallowest
contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and
promise of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple,
and hears the faintest strains of the worshippers; but it will

432 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
have to speak to posterity, traversing these deserts, through
the ruins of its outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of
its proportions.

Thus thoughtfully we were rowing homeward to find some
autumnal work to do, and help on the revolution of the
seasons. Perhaps Nature would condescend to make use of
us even without our knowledge, as when we help to scatter
her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our
clothes from field to field.

All things are current found
On earthly ground,

Spirits and elements
Have their descents.

Night and day, year on year,

High and low, far and near,

These are our own aspects.

These are our own regrets.

Ye gods of the shore.

Who abide evermore,

I see your far headland,

Stretching on either hand ;

I hear the sweet evening sounds
From your undecaying grounds;

Cheat me no more with time.

Take me to your clime.

As it grew later in the afternoon, and we rowed leisurely
up the gentle stream, shut in between fragrant and blooming
banks, where we had first pitched our tent, and drew nearer
to the fields where our lives had passed, we seemed to detect

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 433
the hues of our native sky in the south-west horizon. The
sun was just setting behind the edge of a wooded hill, so rich
a sunset as would never have ended but for some reason un-
known to men, and to be marked with brighter colors than
ordinary in the scroll of time. Though the shadows of the
hills were beginning to steal over the stream, the whole river
valley undulated with mild light, purer and more memorable
than the noon. For so day bids farewell even to solitary vales
uninhabited by man. Two blue-herons, ardea herodiaSy with
their long and slender limbs relieved against the sky, were
seen travelling high over our heads, — their lofty and silent
flight, as they were wending their way at evening, surely not
to alight in any marsh on the earth’s surface but, perchance,
on the other side of our atmosphere, a symbol for the ages
to study, whether impressed upon the sky, or sculptured
amid the hieroglyphics of Eg3q)t. Bound to some northern
meadow, they h^ld on their stately, stationary flight, like the
storks in the picture, and disappeared at length behind the
clouds. Dense flocks of blackbirds were winging their way
along the river’s course, as if on a short evening pilgrimage to
some shrine of theirs, or to celebrate so fair a sunset.

“Therefore, as doth the pilgrim, whom the night
Hastes darkly to imprison on his way,

Think on thy home, my soul, and think aright
Of what’s yet left thee of life’s wasting day:

Thy sun posts westward, passed is thy morn,

And twice it is not given thee to be born.”

The sun-setting presumed all men at leisure and in a con-
templative mood; but the farmer’s boy only whistled the
more thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture,
and the teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided
his team with a subdued voice. The last vestiges of daylight
at length disappeared, and as we rowed silently along with
our backs toward home through the darkness, only a few

m THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in
thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of
our oars, a sort of rudimental music, suitable for the ear of
Night and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls;

^Tulsse referunt ad sidera valles,’^

and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars.

As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were
reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that
the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on
mankind. It is recorded in the Chronicle of Bernaidez, that
in Columbus’ first voyage the natives “pointed toward the
heavens, making signs that they believed that there was all
power and holiness.” We have reason to be grateful for celes-
tial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and endur-
ing as our fairest and most memorable experiences. “Let the
immortal depth of your soul lead you, but earnestly extend
your eyes upwards.”

As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude,
so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence. Silence
is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. She is
^hen we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly.
Creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework
and foil. All sounds are her servants and purveyors, proclaim-
ing not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and
earnestly to be sought after. They are so far akin to Silence,
that they are but bubbles on her surface, which straightway
burst, an evidence of the strength and prolificness of the
under-current; a faint utterance of Silence, and then only
agreeable to our auditory nerves when they contrast them-
selves with and relieve the former. In proportion as they do

ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK 43S
this, and are heighteners and intensifiers of the Silence, they
are harmony and purest melody.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull dis-
courses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin,
as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that back-
ground which the painter may not daub, be he master or
bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have
made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum,
where no indignity can assail, no personality disturb us.

The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most
eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is
a hearer along with his audience. Who has not hearkened to
Her infinite din? She is Truth’s speaking trumpet, the sole
oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona, which kings and courtiers
would do well to consult, nor will they be balked by an am-
biguous answer. For through Her all revelations have been
made, and just , in proportion as men have consulted her
oracle within, they have obtained a clear insight, and their
age has been marked as an enlightened one. But as often as
they have gone gadding abroad to a strange Delphi and her
mad priestess, their age has been dark and leaden. Such were
garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound,
but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever sounding
and resounding in the ears of men.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent
lyres are struck. We not unfrequently refer the interest which
belongs to our own unwritten sequel, to the written and
comparatively lifeless body of the work. Of all books this
sequel is the most indispensable part. It should be the author’s
aim to say once and emphatically, ^‘He said,” This is

the most the bookmaker can attain to. If he make his volume
a mole whereon the waves of Silence may break, it is well.

It were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the Silence.
She cannot be done into English. For six thousand years men
have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and
still she is little better than a sealed book. A man may run on

436 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb,
and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be
silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made ;
for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the dispropor-
tion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but
the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. Nevertheless,
we will go on, like those Chinese cliff swallows, feathering our
nests with the froth which may one day be bread of life to
such as dwell by the seashore.

We had made about fifty miles this day with sail and oar,
and now, far in the evening, our boat was grating against
the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the
Concord mud, where some semblance of its outline was still
preserved in the flattened flags which had scarce yet erected
themselves since our departure; and we leaped gladly on
shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple tree^
whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in
the chafing of the spring freshets.

CAPE COD

[Parts of Cape Cod were published in Putnam* s Mag-
azine in 1855. Two chapters were posthumously pub-
lished in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. The entire
book first appeared in 1865, edited by Ellery Chan-
ning. The following pages are selections from the
book.]

THE SHIPWRECK

Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean,
which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe,
but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never
see any trace, more than of another world, I made a visit to
Cape Cod in October, 1849, another the succeeding June, and
another to Truro in July, 1855; the first and last time with a
single companion, the second time alone. I have spent, in all,
about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to
Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay
side also, excepting four or five miles, and crossed the Cape
half a dozen times on my way; but having come so fresh to
the sea, I have got but little salted. My readers must expect
only so much saltness as the land breeze acquires from blowing
over an arm of the sea, or is tasted on the windows and the
bark of trees twenty miles inland, after September gales. I
have been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within
ten miles of Concord, but latterly I have extended my excur^
sions to the seashore.

I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape Cod,
as well as my neighbor on ‘‘Human Culture.” It is but another
name for the same thing, and hardly a sandier phase of it.
As for my title, I suppose that the word Cape is from the
French cap\ which is from the Latin caput ^ a head; which is,
perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, — that being the part of
which we take hold of a thing:-— Take Time by the forelock.
It is also the safest part to take a serpent by. And as for Cod,
that was derived directly from that “great store of cod-fish”
which Captain Bartholomew Gosnold caught there in 1602;
which fish appears to have been so called from the Saxon

439

440 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
word coddCy case in which seeds are lodged/^ either from
the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains;
whence also, perhaps, codling (^^pomunt coctile”?) and cod-
dle, — to cook green like peas. (V. Die.)

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts:
the shoulder is at Buzzard’s Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at
Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at
Provincetown, — behind which the State stands on her guard,
with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted
on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her Bay, —
boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving
up her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, — ready to
thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while
upon her breast at Cape Ann.

On studying the map, I saw that there must be an uninter-
rupted beach on the east or outside of the forearm of the
Cape, more than thirty miles from the general line of the
coast, which would afford a good sea view, but that, on account
of an opening in the beach, forming the entrance to Nauset
Harbor, in Orleans, I must strike it in Eastham, if I ap-
proached it by land, and probably I could walk thence straight
to Race Point, about twenty-eight miles, and not meet with
any obstruction.

We left Concord, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, October 9,
1849. On reaching Boston, we found that the Provincetown
steamer, which should have got in the day before, had not yet
arrived, on account of a violent storm; and, as we noticed
in the streets a handbill headed, “Death! one hundred and
forty-five lives lost at Cohasset,” we decided to go by way of
Cohasset. We found many Irish in the cars, going to identify
bodies and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to
attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon ; —
and when we arrived at Cohasset, it appeared that nearly all
the passengers were bound for the beach, which was about a
mile distant, and many other persons were flocking in from
the neighboring country. There were several hundreds of them

CAPE COD 441

streaming off over Cohasset common in that direction, some
on foot and some in wagons, — and among them were some
sportsmen in their hunting- jackets, with their guns, and game-
bags, and dogs. As we passed the graveyard we saw a large
hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there, and, just before reaching
the shore, by a pleasantly winding and rocky road, we met
several hay-riggings and farm-wagons coming away toward
the meeting-house, each loaded with three large, rough deal
boxes. We did not need to ask what was in theje. The owners
of the wagons were made the undertakers. Many horses in
carriages were fastened to the fences near the shore, and, for
a mile or more, up and down, the beach was covered with
people looking out for bodies, and examining the fragments
of the wreck. There was a small island called Brook Island,
with a hut on it, lying just off the shore. This is said to be the
rockiest shore in Massachusetts, from Nantasket to Scituate,
— hard sienitic rocks, which the waves have laid bare, but have
not been able to crumble. It has been the scene of many a
shipwreck.

The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with emi-
grants, was wrecked on Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday
morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks.
There were eighteen or twenty of the same large boxes that
I have mentioned, l5dng on a green hillside, a few rods from
the water, and surrounded by a crowd. The bodies which had
been recovered, twenty-seven or eight in all, had been collected
there. Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were
carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which
were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, for each body,
with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with
a white sheet. I witnessed no signs of grief, but there was a
sober dispatch of business which was affecting. One man was
seeking to identify a particular body, and one undertaker or
carpenter was calling to another to know in what box a certain
child was put. I saw many marble feet and matted heads as
the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled

442 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
body of a drowned girl, — ^who probably had intended to go
out to service in some American family, — to which some
rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh,
about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk,
gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle
were exposed, but quite bloodless, — merely red and white, —
with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights;
Dr like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.
Sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and
child, in the same box, and on the lid would perhaps be
written with red chalk, Bridget such-a-one, and sister's
child.’’ The surrounding sward was covered with bits of sails
and clothing. I have since heard, from one who lives by this
beach, that a woman who had come over before, but had left
her infant behind for her sister to bring, came and looked into
these boxes, and saw in one — ^probably the same whose super-
scription I have quoted — ^her child in her sister’s arms, as if
the sister had meant to be found thus ; and within three days
after, the mother died from the effect of that sight.

We turned from this and walked along the rocky shore. In
the first cove were strewn what seemed the fragments of a
vessel, in small pieces mixed with sand and seaweed, and great
quantities of feathers ; but it looked so old and rusty, that I
at first took it to be some old wreck which had lain there
many years. I even thought of Captain Kidd, and that the
feathers were those which sea-fowl had cast there ; and perhaps
there might be some tradition about it in the neighborhood. I
asked a sailor if that was the St. John. He said it was. I asked
him where she struck. He pointed to a rock in front of us, a
mile from the shore, called the Grampus Rock, and added, —

^^You can see a part of her now sticking up; it looks like
a small boat.”

I saw it. It was thought to be held by the chain-cables and
the anchors. I asked if the bodies which I saw were all that
were drowned.

“Not a quarter of them,” said he.

443

CAPE COD

‘‘Where are the rest?’’

“Most of them right underneath that niece you see.’^

It appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to make
the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and that it
would take many days to cart it off. It was several feet deep,
and here and there was a bonnet or a jacket on it. In the very
midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with
carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast
up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though
they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing
from it, and they might at any moment have found a human
body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this
weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not pro-
duced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.

About a mile south we could see, rising above the rocks ^
the masts of the British brig which the St. John had en-
deavored to follow, which had slipped her cables, and, by good
luck, run into the mouth of Cohasset Harbor. A little furthei
along the shore we saw a man’s clothes on a rock; further, a
woman’s scarf, a gown, a straw bonnet, the brig’s caboose,
and one of her masts high and dry, broken into several pieces.
In another rocky cove, several rods from the water, and behind
rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the vessel,
still hanging together. It was, perhaps, forty feet long, by
fourteen wide. I was even more surprised at the power of the
waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, than I had been
at the sight of the smaller fragments before. The largest tim-
bers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and I saw
that no material could withstand the power of the waves ; that
iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would
be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks. Some of these
timbers, however, were so rotten that I could almost thrust
my umbrella through them. They told us that some were
saved on this piece, and also showed where the sea had heaved
it into this cove which was now dry. When I saw where it
had come in, and in what condition, I wondered that any

444 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
bad been saved on it. A little further on a crowd of men was
collected around the mate of the St. John, who was telling his
story. He was a slim-looking youth, who spoke of the captain
as the master, and seemed a little excited. He was saying that
when they jumped into the boat, she filled, and, the vessel
lurching, the weight of the water in the boat caused the painter
to break, and so they were separated. Whereat one man came
away, saying, —

^‘Well, I don’t see but he tells a straight story enough. You
bee, the weight of the water in the boat broke the painter. A
boat full of water is very heavy,^’ — and so on, in a loud and
impertinently earnest tone, as if he had a bet depending on
it, but had no humane interest in the matter.

Another, a large man, stood near by upon a rock, gazing
into the sea, and chewing large quids of tobacco, as if that
habit were forever confirmed with him.

^^Come,” says another to his companion, ^det’s be off. WeVe
seen the whole of it. It’s no use to stay to the funeral.”

Further, we saw one standing upon a rock, who, we were
told, was one that was saved. He was a sober-looking man,
dressed in a jacket and gray pantaloons, with his hands in
the pockets. I asked him a few questions, which he answered;
but he seemed unwilling to talk about it, and soon walked
away. By his side stood one of the life-boat men, in an oil-
cloth jacket, who told us how they went to the relief of the
British brig, thinking that the boat of the St. John, which they
passed on the way, held all her crew, — for the waves prevented
their seeing those who were on the vessel, though they might
have saved some had they known there were any there. A
little further was the flag of the St. John spread on a rock to
dry, and held down by stones at the corners. This frail, but
essential and significant portion of the vessel, which had so
long been the sport of the winds, was sure to reach the shore.
There were one or two houses visible from these rocks, in
which were some of the survivors recovering from the shock

CAPE COD 445

which their bodies and minds had sustained. One was not
expected to live.

We kept on down the shore as far as a promontory called
Whitehead, that we might see more of the Cohasset Rocks,
In a little cove, within half a mile, there were an old man and
his son collecting, with their team, the seaweed which that
fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed as if there had
never been a wreck in the world, though they were within sight
of the Grampus Rock, on which the St. John had struck. The
old man had heard that there was a week and knew most
of the particulars, but be said that he had not been up there
since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned
him most, rock-weed, kelp, and seaweed, as he named them,
which he carted to his barnyard; and those bodies were to
him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were
of no use to him. We afterwards came to the life-boat in its
harbor, waiting for another emergency, — and in the after-
noon we saw the funeral procession at a distance, at the head
of which walked the captain with the other survivors.

On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might
have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach
in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sym^
pathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and
mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If
this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or
pity? If the last day were come, we should not think so much
about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of
individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the
field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree,
as exceptions to the common lot of humanity. Take all the
graveyards together, they are always the majority. It is the
individual and private that demands our sympathy. A man
can attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can behold
but one corpse. Yet I saw that the inhabitants of the shore
would be not a little affected by this event. They would watch
there many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead«

446 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and their imaginations and sympathies would supply the place
of mourners far away, who as yet knew not of the wreck.
Many days after this, something white was seen floating on
the water by one who was sauntering on the beach. It was ap-
proached in a boat, and found to be the body of a woman,
which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was
blown back with the wind. I saw that the beauty of the shore
itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he
could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by
wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer
beauty still.

Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no
friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming
to the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did, — they
were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach
it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus
dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there
is far more universal and convincing evidence — though it has
not yet been discovered by science — than Columbus had of
this: not merely mariners^ tales and some paltry drift-wood
and seaweed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our
shores. I saw their empty hulks that came to land ; but they
themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet further
west, toward which we are all tending, and which we shall
reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they
did. No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have
not been ^^shipwrecked into life again.’’ The mariner who
makes the safest port in Heaven, perchance, seems to his
friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem Boston
Harbor the better place; though perhaps invisible to them, a
skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest
gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in hal-
cyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his
old hulk tosses in the surf here. It is hard to part with one’s
body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when
once it is gone. All their plans and hopes burst like a bubble I

CAPE COD 447

Infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged At-
lantic Ocean! No, no! If the St. John did not make her port
here, she has been telegraphed there. The strongest wind
cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit’s breath. A just man’s
purpose cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock,
but itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN

Having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach,
and passed the boundary between Wellfleet and Truro, a
stone post in the sand, — for even this sand comes under the
jurisdiction of one town or another, — ^we turned inland over
barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some reason, did
not follow us, and, tracing up a Hollow, discovered two or
three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncommonly
near the eastern coast. Their garrets were apparently so full
of chambers, that their roofs could hardly lie down straight,
and we did not doubt that there was room for us there. Houses
near the sea are generally low and broad. These were a story
and a half high; but if you merely counted the windows in
their gable ends, you would think that there were many
stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the
only one thought worthy of being illustrated. The great num-
ber of windows in the ends of the houses, and their irregularity
in size and position, here and elsewhere on the Cape, struck
us agreeably, — as if each of the various occupants who had
their cunabula behind had punched a hole where his neces-
sities required it, and according to his size and stature, with-
out regard to outside effect. There were windows for the
grown folks, and windows for the children, — ^three or four
apiece ; as a certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door
for the cat, and another smaller one for the kitten. Sometimes
they were so low under the eaves that I thought they must
have perforated the plate beam for another apartment, and
I noticed some which were triangular, to fit that part more
exactly. The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as
a revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of

448

CAPE COD 449

staring out the windows that some of our neighbors have, a
traveler must stand a small chance with them.

Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the
Cape looked more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than
the modern and more pretending ones, which were less in
harmony with the scenery, and less firmly planted.

These houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven
in number, the source of a small stream called Herring River,
which empties into the Bay. There are many Herring Rivers
on the Cape ; they will, perhaps, be more numerous than her-
rings soon. We knocked at the door of the first house, but its
inhabitants were all gone away. In the meanwhile, we saw the
occupants of the next one looking out the window at us, and
before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened
the door of her bulkhead, and went in again. Nevertheless,
we did not hesitate to knock at her door, when a grizzly-
looking man appeared, whom we took to be sixty or seventy
years old. He asked us, at first, suspiciously, where we were
from, and what our business was; to which we returned plain
answers.

“How far is Concord from Boston?” he inquired.

“Twenty miles by railroad.”

“Twenty miles by railroad,” he repeated.

“Didn’t you ever hear of Concord of Revolutionary fame?”

“Didn’t I ever heard of Concord? Why, I heard guns fire at
the battle of Bunker Hill. [They hear the sound of heavy
cannon across the Bay.j I am almost ninety; I am eighty-
eight year old. I was fourteen year old at the time of Concord
Fight, — and where were you then?”

We were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight.

“Wei], walk in, we’ll leave it to the women,” said he.

So we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman
taking our hats and bundles, and the old man continued,
drawing up to the large, old-fashioned fire-place, —

“I am a poor, good-for-nothing crittur, as Isaiah says: X

450 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fitn all broken down this year. I am under petticoat govern-
ment here.”

The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his
daughter, who appeared nearly as old as her mother, a fool,
her son (a brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a promi-
nent lower face, who was standing by the hearth when we en -
tered, but immediately went out) , and a little boy of ten.

While my companion talked with the women, I talked with
the old man. They said that he was old and foolish, but he
was evidently too knowing for them.

“These women,” said he to me, “are both of them poor
good-for-nothing critturs. This one is my wife. I married her
sixty-four years ago. She is eighty-four years old, and as deaf
as an adder, and the other is not much better.”

He thought well of the Bible, or at least he spoke well,
and did not think ill, of it, for that would not have been
prudent for a man of his age. He said that he had read it
attentively for many years, and he had much of it at his
tongue’s end. He seemed deeply impressed with a sense of
his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim, —

“I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is just this;
that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is
just as God sees fit and disposes.”

“May I ask your name?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, “I am not ashamed to tell my name.

My name is . My great-grandfather came over from

England and settled here.”

He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a
competency in that business, and had sons still engaged in it.

Nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachu-
setts, I am told, are supplied and kept by natives of Well-
fleet, and a part of this town is still called Billingsgate from
the oysters having been formerly planted there; but the na-
tive oysters are said to have died in 1770. Various causes are
assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of
black -fish, kept to rot in the harbor ^nd the like, but the most

CAPE COD 451

common account of the matter is, — and I find that a similar
superstition with regard to the disappearance of fishes
exists almost everywhere, — that when Wellfleet began to
quarrel with the neighboring towns about the right to gather
them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence caused
them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels
were annually brought from the South and planted in the
harbor of Wellfleet till they attained “the proper relish of
Billingsgate;’’ but now they are imported commonly full-
grown, and laid down near their markets, at Boston and else-
where, where the water, being a mixture of salt and fresh,
suits them better. The business was said to be still good and
improving.

The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in
the winter, if planted too high; but if it were not “so cold as
to strain their eyes” they were not injured. The inhabitants
of New Brunswick have noticed that “ice will not form over
an oyster-bed, unless the cold is very intense indeed, and
when the bays are frozen over the oyster-beds are easily dis-
covered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or as
the French residents say, digele^ Our host said that they
kept them in cellars all winter.

“Without anything to eat or drink?” I asked.

“Without anything to eat or drink,” he answered.

“Can the oysters move?”

“Just as much as my shoe.”

But when I caught him saying that they “bedded them-
selves down in the sand, flat side up, round side down,” I
told him that my shoe could not do that, without the aid of
my foot in it ; at which he said that they merely settled down
as they grew; if put down in a square they would be found
so; but the clam could move quite fast. I have since been
told by oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still
indigenous and abundant, that they are found in large masses
attached to the parent in their midst, and are so taken up with
their tongs; in which case, they say, the age of the young

452 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
proves that there could have been no motion for five or six
years at least. And Buckland in his Curiosities of Natural
History (page 50) says: “An oyster, who has once taken up
his position and fixed himself when quite young, can never
make a change. Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed
themselves, but remain loose at the bottom of the sea, have
the power of locomotion; they open their shells to their fullest
extent, and then suddenly contracting them, the expulsion of
the water forwards gives a motion backwards. A fisherman
at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen oysters mov-
ing in this way.'’

Some still entertain the question “whether the oyster was
indigenous in Massachusetts Bay,” and whether Wellfleet
harbor was a “natural habitat” of this fish ; but, to say nothing
of the testimony of old oystermen, which, I think, is quite
conclusive, though the native oyster may now be extinct there,
I saw that their shells, opened by the Indians, were strewn
all over the Cape. Indeed, the Cape was at first thickly settled
by Indians on account of the abundance of these and other
fish. We saw many traces of their occupancy after this, in
Truro, near Great Hollow, and at High-Head, near East
Harbor River, — oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells,
mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and other quad-
rupeds. I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour
or two could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians
lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some
instances ponds, for shelter and water. Moreover, Champlain,
in the edition of his “Voyages” printed in 1613, says that in
the year 1606 he and Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barn-
stable Harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called
Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42°, about five leagues south,
one point west of Cape Blanc (Cape Cod), and there they
found many good oysters, and they named it “/e Port aux
Huistres^^ [sic] (Oyster Harbor). In one edition of his map
(1632), the “-R. aux Escailles^^ is drawn emptying into the,
same part of the bay. and on the map ^^Novi in

CAPE COB 453

Ogilby's America (1670), the words ‘'Port aux HuistreP'
are placed against the same place. Also William Wood, who
left New England in 1633, speaks, in his “New England’s
Prospect,” published in 1634, of “a great oyster-bank” in
Charles River, and of another in the Mistick, each of which
obstructed the navigation of its river. “The oysters,” says
he, “be great ones in form of a shoe-horn; some be a foot
long ; these breed on certain banks that are bare every spring
tide. This fish without the shell is so big, that it must admit
of a division before you can well get it into your mouth.”
Oysters are still found there.^

Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily
obtained; it was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side,
only cast ashore there in small quantities in storms. The fish-
erman sometimes wades in water several feet deep, and thrusts
a pointed stick into the sand before him. When this enters
between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and is
drawn out. It has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the
Acushnet at New Bedford one day since this, watching some
ducks, when a man informed me that, having let out his
young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire (Salicornia)
and other weeds along the riverside at low tide that morning,
at length he noticed that one remained stationary, amid the
weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and
going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog’s shell.
He took up both together, carried them to his home, and his
wife opening the shell with a knife released the duck and
cooked the quahog. The old man said that the great clams
were good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part
which was poisonous, before they cooked them. “People said
it would kill a cat.” I did not tell him that I had eaten a large
one entire that afternoon, but began to think I was tougher
than a cat. He stated that pedlers came round there, and some*

1 Also, see Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, p. 90.

.154 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
times tried to sell the women folks a skimmer, but he told
diem that their women had got a better skimmer than they
20 uld make, in the shell of their clams; it was shaped just
right for this purpose. — They call them “skim-alls’’ in some
places. He also said that the sun-squall was poisonous to
handle, and when the sailors came across it, they did not
meddle with it, but heaved it out of their way. I told him that
I had handled it that afternoon, and felt no ill effects as yet.
But he said it made the hands itch, especially if they had pre-
viously been scratched, or if I put it into my bosom, I should
find out what it was.

He informed us that no ice ever formed on the back side
of the Cape, or not more than once in a century, and but little
snow lay there, it being either absorbed or blown or washed
away. Sometimes in winter, when the tide was down, the
beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the back side
for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One winter when
he was a boy, he and his father “took right out into the back
side before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back
to dinner.”

When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking
land, where I saw so few cultivated fields, — “Nothing,” he
said.

“Then why fence your fields?”

“To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the
whole.”

“The yellow sand,” said he, “has some life in it, but the
white little or none.”

When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a
surveyor, he said that they who surveyed his farm were ac-
customed, where the ground was uneven, to loop up each chain
as high as their elbows; that was the allowance they made,
and he wished to know if I could tell him why they did not
come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to
have more respect for surveyors of the old school, which I
did not wonder at. “King George the Third,” said he, “laid

CAPE COD 455

out a road four rods wide and straight the whole length of the
Cape/’ but where it was now he could not tell.

This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long-
Islander, who once, when I had made ready to jump from the
bow of his boat to the shore, and he thought that I underrated
the distance and would fall short, — though I found afterward
that he judged of the elasticity of my joints by his own, — ^told
me that when he came to a brook which he wanted to get over,
he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any
part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it.
^‘Why,” I told him, ^^to say nothing of the Mississippi, and
other small watery streams, I could blot out a star with my
foot, but I would not engage to jump that distance,” and
asked how he knew when he had got his leg at the right eleva
tion. But he regarded his legs as no less accurate than a pail
of screw dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and appeared to
have a painful recollection of every degree and minute in the
arc which they described ; and he would have had me believe
that there was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered
the purpose. I suggested that he should connect his two ankles
by a string of the proper length, which should be the chord
of an arc, measuring his jumping ability on horizontal sur-
faces, — assuming one leg to be a perpendicular to the plane of
the horizon, which, however, may have been too bold an as-
sumption in this case. Nevertheless, this was a kind of geom-
etry in the legs which it interested me to hear of.

Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds,
most of which we could see from his windows, and making us
repeat them after him, to see if we had got them right. They
were Gull Pond, the largest and a very handsome one, clear
and deep, and more than a mile in circumference, Newcomb’s,
Swett’s, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and Herring Ponds, all
connected at high water, if I do not mistake. The coast-
surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them
of one which they had not detected. He said that they were
not so high as formerly. There was an earthquake about four

456 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
years before he was born, which cracked the pans of the ponds,
which were of iron, and caused them to settle. I did not re-
member to have read of this. Innumerable gulls used to resort
to them; but the large gulls were now very scarce, for, as he
said, the English robbed their nests far in the north, where
ihey breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the
gull-house, and when small birds were killed by means of a
frying-pan and fire at night. His father once lost a valuable
horse from this cause. A party from Wellfleet having lighted
their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on Billingsgate
Island, twenty horses which were pastured there, and this
colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in
the dark to cross the passage which separated them from
the neighboring beach, and which was then fordable at low
tide, were all swept out to sea and drowned. I observed that
many horses were still turned out to pasture all summer on
the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham, and Orleans,
as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what he
called ^^wild hens,’’ here, after they had gone to roost in the
woods, when he was a boy. Perhaps they were ‘‘prairie hens’'
(pinnated grouse).

He liked the beach-pea {Lathyrus maritimus), cooked
green, as well as the cultivated. He had seen it growing very
abundantly in Newfoundland, where also the inhabitants ate
them, but he had never been able to obtain any ripe for seed.
We read, under the head of Chatham, that “in 15SS, during
a time of great scarcity, the people about Orford, in Sussex
(England) were preserved from perishing by eating the seeds
of this plant, which grew there in great abundance upon the
sea coast. Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it.” But the
writer who quoted this could not learn that they had ever been
used in Barnstable County.

He had been a voyager, then? Oh, he had been about the
world in his day. He once considered himself a pilot for all our
coast; but now they had changed the names so he might be
bothered.

CAPE COD 45?

He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting,
a pleasant apple which he raised, and frequently grafted
from, but had never seen growing elsewhere, except once, —
three trees on Newfoundland, or at the Bay of Chaleur, I
forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that he could
tell the tree at a distance.

At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard,
came in, muttering between his teeth, '‘Damn book-pedlers,
— all the lime talking about books. Better do something.
Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em. Got a doctor down heie. Damn him.
I’ll get a gun and shoot him; ” never once holding up his head.
Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as if
he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first
lime he had been obliged to exert his authority there: ‘^John,
go sit down, mind your business, — ^we’ve heard you talk be-
fore, — ^precious little you’ll do, — ^your bark is worse than your
bite.” But, without minding, John muttered the same gib-
berish over again, and then sat dowm at the table which the
old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and then turned
to the apples, which his aged mother was paring, that she
might give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she
drew them away and sent him off.

When I approached this house the next summer, over the
desolate hills between it and the shore, which are worthy to
have been the birthplace of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the
midst of a cornfield on the hillside, but, as usual, he loomed
so strangely, that I mistook him for a scarecrow.

This was thi merriest old man that we had ever seen, and
one of the best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse
and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have
made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and
we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his
story.

“Not by Haemonian hills the Thracian bard,

Nor awful Phoebus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard.”

458 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

There was a strange mingling of past and present in his
conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might
have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally
were born. He said that one day, when the troubles between
the Colonies and the mother country first broke out, as he,
a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Donne,
an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good whig,
said to him, ‘‘Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake
to pitch that pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the
Colonies to undertake to gain their independence.’’ He remem-
bered well General Washington, and how he rode his horse
along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us how
he looked.

“He was a r — a — ther large and portly-looking man, a
manly and resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as
he sat on his horse.” — “There, III tell you, this was the way
with Washington.” Then he jumped up again, and bowed
gracefully to right and left, making show as if he were waving
his hat. Said he, ^^That was Washington.”

He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was
much pleased when we told him that we had read the same in
history, and that his account agreed with the written.

“Oh,” he said, “I know, I know! I was a young fellow of
sixteen, with my ears wide open ; and a fellow of that age^ you
know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything
that’s going on. Oh, I know!”

He told us the story of the wreck of the Franklin, which
took place there the previous spring; how a boy came to his
house early in the morning to know whose boat that was by
the shore, for there was a vessel in distress, and he, being an
old man, first ate his breakfast, and then walked over to the
top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there, having found
a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She was on the
bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the
men on the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render
no assistance on account of the breakers, for there was a pretty

CAPE COD 459

high sea running. There were the passengers all crowded to-
gether in the forward part of the ship, and some were getting
out of the cabin windows and were drawn on deck by the
others.

'T saw the captain get out his boat,’’ said he; “he had one
little one; and then they jumped into it one after another,
down as straight as an arrow. I counted them. There were
nine. One was a women^ and she jumped as straight as any of
them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them back, one wave
went over them, and when they came up there were six still
clinging to the boat; I counted them. The next wave turned
the boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of
them ever came ashore alive. There were the rest of them all
crowded together on the forecastle, the other parts of the
ship being under water. They had seen all that happened to
the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the forecastle from
the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst breaker,
and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were
left, but one woman.”

He also told us of the steamer Cambria’s getting aground
on this shore a few months before we were there, and of her
English passengers who roamed over his grounds, and who,
he said, thought the prospect from the high hill by the shore,
“the most delightsome they had ever seen,” and also of the
pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the
ponds. He spoke of these travelers with their purses full of
guineas, just as our provincial fathers used to speak of British
bloods in the time of King George the Third.

Quid loquar? Why repeat what he told us?

“Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,

Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
Dulichias vexasse rates, et gurgite in alto
Ah I timidos nautas canibus lacetasse marinis?”

In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of
the clam which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to

460 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
our host that I was no tougher than the cat he told of; but he
answered, that he was a plain-spoken man, and he could tell
me that it was all imagination. At any rate, it proved an
emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by it for a short
time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to read
afterward, in Mourt’s Relation of the landing of the Pilgrims
in Provincetown Harbor, these words: ^^We found great
muscles (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-
clams) and very fat and full of sea-pearl; but we could not
eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors
as passengers, . . . but they were soon well again.’’ It
brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a
similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was
a valuable confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now
to believe every word of Mourt’s Relation. I was also pleased
to find that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one
another. But I did not notice sea-pearl. Like Cleopatra, I
must have swallowed it. I have since dug these clams on a
flat in the Bay and observed them. They could squirt full ten
feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops
on the sand,

^‘Now I am going to ask you a question,” said the old man,
^‘and I don’t know as you can tell me; but you are a learned
man, and I never had any learning, only what I got by natur.”
— It was in vain that we reminded him that he could quote
Josephus to our confusion. — ^T’ve thought, if I ever met r
learned man I should like to ask him this question. Can you
tell me how Axy is spelt, and what it means? says he;

^Hhere’s a girl over here is named Axy. Now what is it? What
does it mean? Is it Scripture? I’ve read my Bible twenty-five
years over and over, and I never came across it.”

^^Did you read it twenty-five years for this object?” I asked.

‘Well, how is it spelt? Wife, how is it spelt?”

She said, “It is in the Bible; I’ve seen it.”

“Well, how dc you ^ell it?”

don’t know. A c h, ach, s e h, seh, — Achseh.”

CAPE COD 461

‘^Does that spell Axy? Well, do you know what it means?”
asked he, turning to me.

^^No,” I replied, “I never heard the sound before.”

‘^There was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked
him what it meant, and he said it had no more meaning than
a bean-pole.”

I told him that I held the same opinion with the school-
master. I had been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange
names to deal with. I also heard of such names as Zoheth,
Beriah, Amaziah, Bethuel, and Shearjashub, hereabouts.

At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-
corner, took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and
having had his sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed ; then
the fool made bare his knotty-looking feet and legs, and fol-
lowed him; and finally the old man exposed his calves also
to our gaze. We had never had the good fortune to see an old
man’s legs before, and were surprised to find them fair and
plump as an infant’s, and we thought that he took a pride in
exhibiting them. He then proceeded to make preparations for
retiring, discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plainness of
speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. W^ were a
rare haul for him. He could commonly get none but ministers
to talk to, though sometimes ten of them at once, and he was
glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. The evening was not
long enough for him. As I had been sick, the old lady asked
if I would not go to bed, — it was getting late for old people;
but the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, “You
ain’t particular, are you?”

“Oh, no,” said I, “I am in no hurry. I believe I have weath-
ered the Clam cape.”

“They are good,” said he; “I wish I had some of them now.”

“They never hurt me,” said the old lady.

“But then you took out the part that killed a cat,” said I.

At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he
promised to resume in the morning. Yet, after all, one of the
old ladies who came into our room in the night to fasten the

462 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fire-board, which rattled, as she went out took the precaution
to fasten us in. Old women are by nature more suspicious than
old men. However, the winds howled around the house, and
made the fire-boards as well as the casements rattle well that
night. It was probably a windy night' for any locality, but we
could not distinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean
from that which was due to the wind alone.

The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant
and interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving
the shore at this place the next summer, and had got a quarter
of a mile distant, ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden,
loud sound from the sea, as if a large steamer were letting off
steam by the shore, so that I caught my breath and felt my
blood run cold for an instant, and I turned about, expecting
to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her course,
but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was a low
bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean,
and suspecting that I might have risen into another stratum
of air in ascending the hill, — which had wafted to me only the
ordinary roar of the sea, — I immediately descended again, to
see if I lost hearing of it ; but, without regard to my ascending
or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet there
was scarcely any wind all the while. The old man said that
this was what they called the “rut,’^ a peculiar roar of the
sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not ac-
count for. He thought that he could tell all about the weather
from the sounds which the sea made.

Old Josselyn, who came to New England in 1638, has it
among his weather-signs, that ‘^the resounding of the sea from
the shore, and murmuring of the winds in the woods, without
apparent wind, sheweth wind to follow.”

Being on another part of the coast one night since this, I
heard the roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants
said it was a sign that the wind would work round east, and we
should have rainy weather. The ocean was heaped up some-
where at the eastward, and this roar was occasioned by its

CAPE COD 463

effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching the shore
before the wind. Also the captain of a packet between this
country and England told me that he sometimes met with a
wave on the Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in
a calm sea, which indicated that at a distance the wind was
blowing from an opposite quarter, but the undulation had
traveled faster than it. Sailors tell of ‘^tide-rips” and “ground-
swells,” which they suppose to have been occasioned by hur-
ricanes and earthquakes, and to have traveled many hundred,
and sometimes oven two or three thousand miles.

Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and
I ran over to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean.
The old woman of eighty-four winters was already out in the
cold morning wind, bare-headed, tripping about like a young
girl, and driving up the cow to milk. She got the breakfast with
dispatch, and without noise or bustle; and meanwhile the old
man resumed his stories, standing before us, who were sitting,
with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco-juice
right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the
various dishes which were there preparing. At breakfast we had
eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and
tea. The old man talked a steady stream ; and when his wife
told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said : “Don’t hurry
me; I have lived too long to be hurried.” I ate of the apple-
sauce and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the
least detriment from the old man’s shots, but my companion
refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green
beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of
the hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that
the buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how
it suffered repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it ; but he de-
clared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the
apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had therefore declined
that. After breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of
order, and oiled it with some “hen’s grease,” for want of sweet
oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or

464 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
pedlers; meanwhile, he told a story about visions, which had
reference to a crack in the clock-case made by frost one night.
He was curious to know to what religious sect we belonged.
He said that he had been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in
one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of
them, — he stuck to his Bible. There was nothing like any
of them in his Bible. While I was shaving in the next room, I
heard him ask my companion to what sect he belonged, to
which he answered, —

‘‘Oh, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood.^’

“What’s that?” he asked, “Sons o’ Temperance?”

Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was
pleased to find that we called by the same name that he
did, and paying for our entertainment, we took our departure;
but he followed us out of doors, and made us tell him the
names of the vegetables which he had raised from seeds that
came out of the Franklin. They were cabbage, broccoli, and
parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things, he
tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden,
both wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which
he cultivated wholly himself. Besides the common garden
vegetables, there were yellow-dock, lemon balm, hyssop, Gill-
go-over-the-ground, mouse-ear, chick-weed, Roman worm-
wood, elecampane, and other plants. As we stood there, I saw a
fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond.

“There,” said I, “he has got a fish.”

“Well,” said the old man, who was looking all the while, but
could see nothing, “he didn’t dive, he just wet his claws.”

And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said
that they often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick
him out with his talons ; but as he bore his shining prey over
the bushes, it fell to the ground, and we did not see that he
recovered it. That is not their practice.

Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he stand-
ing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us “athwart the
fields,” and we took to the beach again for another day, it
being now late in the morning.

CAPE COD 46S

It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the
Provincetown Bank was broken open and robbed by two men
from the interior, and we learned that our hospitable enter-
tainers did at least transiently harbor the suspicion that we
were the men.

THE HIGHLAND LIGHT

This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or
Highland Light, is one of our ^‘primary sea-coast lights,’’ and
is usually the first seen by those approaching the entrance of
Massachusetts Bay from Europe. It is forty-three miles from
Cape Ann Light, and forty-one from Boston Light. It stands
about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is here
formed of clay. I borrowed the plane and square, level and
dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by,
and, using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a
rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sight and pivots, and got
the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house,
and with a couple of codline the length of its slope, and so
measured its height on the shingle. It rises one hundred and
ten feet above its immediate base, or about one hundred and
twenty- three feet above mean low water. Graham, who has
carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, makes it one
hundred and thirty feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an
angle of forty degrees with the horizon, where I measured it,
but the clay is generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever
gets down it. Half a mile farther south the bank is fifteen or
twenty-five feet higher, and that appeared to be the highest
land in North Truro. Even this vast clay bank is fast wearing
away. Small streams of water trickling down it at intervals of
two or three rods, have left the intermediate clay in the form
of steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as
sharp and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank
is curiously eaten out in the form of a large semi-circular
crater.

According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting

466

CAPE COD 467

here on both sides, though most on the eastern. In some places
it had lost many rods within the last year, and, ere long, the
light-house must be moved. We calculated, jrom his data, how
soon the Cape would be quite worn away at this point, ^'for,’^
said he, can remember sixty years back.’’ We were even
more surprised at this last announcement — ^that is, at the slow
waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken
him to be not more than forty — than at the rapid w^asting of
the Cape, and we thought that he stood a fair chance to out-
live the former.

Between this October and June of the next year, I found
that the bank had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite
the light-house, and it was cracked more than forty feet far-
ther from the edge at the last date, the shore being strewm
with the recent rubbish. But I judged that generally it was
not wearing away here at the rate of more than six feet an-
nually. Any conclusions drawn from the observations of a few
years, or one generation only, are likely to prove false, and
the Cape may balk expectation by its durability. In some
places even a wrecker’s foot-path down the bank lasts several
years. One old inhabitant told us that when the light-house
was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it would stand forty-
five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of fence each
year, '‘but,” said he, “there it is” (or rather another near the
same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank) .

The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere, for one
man told me of a vessel wrecked long ago on the north of
Provincetown whose **bones^^ (this was his word) are still
visible many rods within the present line of the beach, half
buried in sand. Perchance they lie alongside the timbers of
a whale. The general statement of the inhabitants is, that the
Cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on partic-
ular points on the south and west, as at Chatham and Mono-
moy Beaches, and at Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points.
James Freeman stated in his day that above three miles had
been added to Monomoy Beach during the previous fifty years,

468 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and it is said to be still extending as fast as ever. A writer in
the Massachusetts Magazine, in the last century, tells us that
^‘when the English first settled upon the Cape, there was an
island off Chatham, at three leagues’ distance, called Webb’s
Island, containing twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or
savin. The inhabitants of Nantucket used to carry wood from
it;” but he adds that in his day a large rock alone marked the
spot, and the water was six fathoms deep there. The entrance
to Nauset Harbor, which was once in Eastham, has now trav-
eled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet Harbor once
formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass
between them. And so of many other parts of this coast.

Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape it
gives to another, — robs Peter to pay Paul. On the eastern side
the sea appears to be everywhere encroarliing on the land.
Not only the land is undermined, and its ruins carried off by
currents, but the sand in blown from the beach directly
up the steep bank, where it is one hundred and fifty feet
high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If
you sit on the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this
by soon getting your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its
height as fast as it is worn away. This sand is steadily travel-
ing westward at a rapid rate, ^^more than a hundred yards,”
says one writer, within the memory of inhabitants now living;
so that in some places peat-meadows are buried deep under the
sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a large
peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the
bank covered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there.
This accounts for that great pebble of peat which we saw in
the surf. The old oysterman had told us that many years ago
he lost a ^^crittur” by her being mired in a swamp near the
Atlantic side east of his house, and twenty years ago he lost
the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it appear-
ing on the beach. He also said that he had seen cedar stumps
‘‘as big as cartwheels” ( I ) on the bottom of the Bay, three
miles off Billingsgate Point, when leaning over the side of his

CAPE COD 469

boat in pleasant weather, and that that was dry land not long
ago. Another told us that a log canoe known to have been
buried many years before on the Bay side at East Harbor in
Truro, where the Cape is extremely narrow, appeared at
length on the Atlantic side, the Cape having rolled over it, and
an old woman said, — ‘‘Now, you see, it is true what I told you,
that the Cape is moving.’^

The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and in
many places there is occasionally none at all. We ourselves ob-
served the effect of a single storm with a high tide in the night,
in July, 1855. It moved the sand on the beach opposite the
light-house to the depth of six feet, and three rods in width as
far as we could see north and south, and carried it bodily off
no one knows exactly where, laying bare in one place a large
rock five feet high which was invisible before, and narrowing
the beach to that extent. There is usually, as I have said, no
bathing on the back side of the Cape, on account of the un-
dertow, but when we were there last, the sea had, three months
before, cast up a bar near this light-house, two miles long and
ten rods wide, over which the tide did not flow, leaving a nar-
row cove, then a quarter of a mile long, between it and the
shore, which afforded excellent bathing. This cove had from
time to time been closed up as the bar traveled northward, In
one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whiting and
cod, which died there, and the water as often turned fresh and
finally gave place to sand. This bar, the inhabitants assured
us, might be wholly removed, and the water six feet deep
there in two or three days.

The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed
strong on to the shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but
when it blowed off they took no sand away ; for in the former
case the wind heaped up the surface of the water next to the
beach, and to preserve its equilibrium a strong undertow im*
mediately set back again into the sea which carried with it the
sand and whatever else was in the way, and left the beach
hard to walk on; but in the latter case the undertow set on.

470 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and carried the sand with it, so that it was particularly diffi-
cult for shipwrecked men to get to land when the wind blowed
on to the shore, but easier when it blowed off. This undertow,
meeting the next surface wave on the bar which itself has
made, forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as
over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land, holding
a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat
plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at
last. The sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but
before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its
honest west wind to recover some of its own. But, according
to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of
sand-bars and banks are principally determined, not by winds
and waves, but by tides.

The Highland Light-house,^ where we were staying, is a
substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, and sur-
mounted by an iron cap. Attached to it is the dwelling of the
keeper, one story high, also of brick, and built by government.
As we were going to spend the night in a light-house, we
wished to make the most of so novel an experience, and there-
fore told our host that we would like to accompany him when
he went to light up. At rather early candle-light he lighted a
small Japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than we
like on ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. He led
the way first through his bedroom, which was placed nearest
to the light-house, and then through a long, narrow, covered
passage-way, between whitewashed walls like a prison entry,
into the lower part of the light-house, where many great butts
of oil were arranged around ; thence we ascended by a winding
and open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent of
oil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and
through this into the lantern. It was a neat building, with

1 The light-house has since been rebuilt, and shows a Fresnel light.

CAPE COD 471

everything in apple-pie order, and no danger of anything
rusting there for want of oil. The light consisted of fifteen
argand lamps, placed within smooth concave reflectors
twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged in two hori-
zontal circles one above the other, facing every way ex-
cepting directly down the Cape. These were surrounded, at
a distance of two or three feet, by large plate-glass windows,
which defied the storms, with iron sashes, on which rested the
iron cap. All the iron work, except the floor, was painted white.
And thus the light-house was completed. We walked slowly
round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each lamp in
succession, conversing with him at the same moment that
many a sailor on the deep witnessed the lighting of the High-
land Light. His duty was to fill and trim and light his lamps,
and keep bright the reflectors. He filled them every morning,
and trimmed them commonly once in the course of the night.
He complained of the quality of the oil which was furnished.
This house consumes about eight hundred gallons in a year,
which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but perhaps a few
lives would be saved if better oil were provided. Another
light-house keeper said that the same proportion of winter-
strained oil was sent to the southernmost light-house in the
Union as to the most northern. Formerly, when this light-
house had windows with small and thin panes, a severe storm
would sometimes break the glass, and then they were obliged’
to put up a wooden shutter in haste to save their lights and
reflectors, — and sometimes in tempests, when the mariner
stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus nearly
converted the light-house into a dark lantern, which emitted
only a few feeble rays, and those commonly on the land or
lee side. He spoke of the anxiety and sense of responsibility
which he felt in cold and stormy nights in the winter; when
he knew that many a poor fellow was depending on him, and
his lamps burned dimly, the oil being chilled. Sometimes he
was obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at mid-
night, and fill his lamps over again, — for he could not have a

472 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fire in the light-house, it produced such a sweat on the win-
dows. His successor told me that he could not keep too hot a
fire in such a case. All this because the oil was poor. A govern-
ment lighting the mariners on its wintry coast with summer-
strained oil, to save expense! That were surely a summer-
strained mercy.

This keeper’s successor, who kindly entertained me the next
year, stated that one extremely cold night, when this and all
the neighboring lights were burning summer oil, but he had
been provident enough to reserve a little winter oil against
emergencies, he was waked up with anxiety, and found that
his oil was congealed, and his lights almost extinguished ; and
when, after many hours’ exertion, he had succeeded in re-
plenishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and
with difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and found
that the other lights in the neighborhood, which were usually
visible to him, h^d gone out, and he heard afterward that
the Pamet River and Billingsgate Lights also had been ex-
tinguished.

Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows caused
him much trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths
covered them and dimmed his lights; sometimes even small
birds flew against the thick plate glass, and were found on
the ground beneath in the morning with their necks broken.
In the spring of 1855 he found nineteen small yellow birds,
perhaps goldfinches or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead around
the light-house; and sometimes in the fall he had seen where
a golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the
down and the fatty part of its breast on it.

Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shin-
ing before men. Surely the light-house keeper has a responsi-
ble, if an easy, office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or,
at most, only one such accident is pardoned.

I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live
there, to profit by all that light, since he v/ould not rob the
mariner. ‘Well,” he said, “I do sometimes come up here and

CAPE COD 473

read the newspaper when they are noisy down below/’ Think
of fifteen argand lamps to read the newspaper by! Govern-
ment oil! — light enough, perchance, to read the Constitution
by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his
Bible by that light. I had a classmate who fitted for college
by the lamps of a light-house, which was more light, we
think, than the University afforded.

When we had come down and walked a dozen rods from
the light-house, we found that we could not get the full
strength of its light on the narrow strip of land between it and
the shore, being too low for the focus, and we saw only so
many feeble and rayless stars; but at forty rods inland we
could see to read though we were still indebted to only one
lamp. Each reflector sent forth a, separate ^Tan” of light, —
one shone on the windmill, and one in the hollow, while the
intervening spaces were in shadow. This light is said to be
visible twenty nautical miles and more, from an observer fif-
teen feet above the level of the sea. We could see the revolving
light at Race Point, the end of the Cape, about nine miles
distant, and also the light on Long Point, at the entrance of
Provincetown Harbor, and one of the distant Plymouth Har-
bor lights, across the Bay, nearly in a range with the last, like
a star in the horizon. The keeper thought that the other
Plymouth light was concealed by being exactly in a range with
the Long Point Light. He told us that the mariner was some-
times led astray by a mackerel fisher’s lantern, who was afraid
of being run down in the night, or even by a cottager’s light,
mistaking them for some well-known light on the coast, and,
when he discovered his mistake, was wont to curse the pru-
dent fisher or the wakeful cottager without reason.

Though it was once declared that Providence placed this
mass of clay here on purpose to erect a light-house on, the
keeper said that the light-house should have been erected half
a mile farther south, where the coast begins to bend, and where
the light could be seen at the same time with the Nauset lights,
and distinguished from them. They now talk of building one

474 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
there. It happens that the present one is the more useless now>
BO near the extremity of the Cape, because other light-houses
have since been erected there.

Among the many regulations of the Light-house Board,
hanging against the wall here, many , of them excellent, per-
haps, if there were a regiment stationed here to attend to
them, there is one requiring the keeper to keep an account of
the number of vessels which pass his light during the day. But
there are a hundred vessels in sight at once, steering in all
directions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and he
must have more eyes than Argus, and be a good deal farther
sighted, to tell which are passing his light. It is an employment
in some respects best suited to the habits of the gulls which
coast up and down here, and circle over the sea.

I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of June
following, a particularly clear and beautiful morning, he
rose about half an hour before sunrise, and having a little
time to spare, for his custom was to extinguish his lights at
sunrise, walked down toward the shore to see what he might
find. When he got to the edge of the bank he looked up, and,
to his astonishment, saw the sun rising, and already part
way above the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong,
he made haste back, and though it was still too early by the
clock, extinguished his lamps, and when he had got through
and come down, he looked out the window, and, to his still
greater astonishment, saw the sun just where it was before,
two thirds above the horizon. He showed me where its rays
fell on the wall across the room. He proceeded to make a
fire, and when he had done, there was the sun still at the same
height. Whereupon, not trusting to his own eyes any longer,
he called up his wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There
were vessels in sight on the ocean, and their crews, too, he
said, must have seen it, for its rays fell on them. It remained
at that height for about fifteen minutes by the clock, and then
rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary happened during
that -day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never

CAPE COD 475

witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested
that there might have been a cbud in the horizon invisible
to him, which rose with the sun, and his clock was only as
accurate as the average ; or perhaps, as he denied the possi-
bility of this, it was such a looming of the sun as is said to
occur at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John Franklin, for
instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on the
shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction varied so
much one morning that ^Hhe upper limb of the sun twice ap-
peared at the horizon before it finally rose.’’

He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun
looms, when there are so many millions to whom it glooms
rather, or who never see it till an hour ajter it has risen. But
it behooves us old stagers to keep our lamps trimmed and
burning to the last, and not trust to the sun’s looming.

This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should
be exactly opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that ac-
cordingly, if he was not careful to turn down his wicks in the
morning, the sun falling on the reflectors on the south side of
the building would set fire to them, like a burning-glass, in
the coldest day, and he would look up at noon and see them all
lighted ! When your lamp is ready to give light, it is readiest
to receive it, and the sun will light it. His successor said that
he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely
to smoke.

I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea turn or
shallow fog while I was there the next summer, it being clear
overhead, the edge of the bank twenty rods distant appeared
like a mountain pasture in the horizon. I was completely de-
ceived by it, and I could then understand why mariners some-
times ran ashore in such cases, especially in the night, suppos-
ing it to be far away, though they could see the land. Once
since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hundred
miles from here, in a dark night, when there was a thin veil
of mist on land and water, we came so near to running on to
the land before our skipper w^s aware of it, that the first

476 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
warning was my hearing the sound of the surf under my elbow.
I could almost have jumped ashore, and we were obliged to
go about very suddenly to prevent striking. The distant light
for which we were steering, supposing it a light-house, five or
six miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman's bunk
not more than six rods distant.

The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little
ocean house. He was a man of singular patience and intel-
ligence, who, when our queries struck him, rang as clear as a
bell in response. The light-house lamp a few feet distant shone
full into my chamber, and made it as bright as day, so I
knew exactly how the Highland Light bore all that night, and
I was in no danger of being wrecked. Unlike the last, this was
as still as a summer night. I thought as I lay there, half awake
and half asleep, looking upward through the window at the
lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out
on the Ocean stream — mariners of all nations spinning their
yarns through the various watches of the night — were directed
toward my couch.

Before sunset, having already seen the mackerel fleet re-
turning into the Bay, we left the sea-shore on the north of
Provincetown, and made our way across the desert to the
eastern extremity of the town. From the first high sand-hill,
covered with beach-grass and bushes to its top, on the edge
of the desert, we overlooked the shrubbery hill and swamp
country which surrounds Provincetown on the north, and
protects it, in some measure, from the invading sand. Not-
withstanding the universal barrenness, and the contiguity of
the desert, I never saw an autumnal landscape so beautifully
painted as this was. It was like the richest rug imaginable
spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor
Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever
match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckle-
berry, and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with

CAPE COD 477

the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the
duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry, and Plum, the yel-
lowish green of the Shrub-Oaks, and the various golden and
yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and
Aspen, — each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the.
few yellow sandslides on the sides of the hills looked like the
white floor seen through rents in the rug. Coming from the
country as I did, and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this
was perhaps the most novel and remarkable sight that I saw
on the Cape. Probably the brightness of the tints was en-
hanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this tract.
This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. We had for
days walked up the long and bleak piazza which runs along
her Atlantic side, then over the sanded floor of her halls, and
now we were being introduced into her boudoir. The hundred
white sails crowding round Long Point into Provincetown
Harbor, seen oyer the painted hills in front, looked like toy
ships upon a mantel-piece.

The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted in
the lowness and thickness of the shrubbery, no less than in the
brightness of the tints. It was like a thick stuff of worsted or a
fleece, and looked as if a giant could take it up by the hem,
or rather the tasseled fringe which trailed out on the sand, and
shake it, though it needed not to be shaken. But no doubt the
dust would fly in that case, for not a little has accumulated un-
derneath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape as this
which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets? Here*
after when I look on a richer rug than usual, and study its
figures, I shall think, there are the huckleberry hills, and there
the denser swamps of boxberry and blueberry; there the
shrub-oak patches and the bayberries, there the maples and
the birches and the pines. What other dyes are to be com-
pared to these? They were warmer colors than I had associated
with the New England coast.

After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climbing
several hills covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, where

m THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
shipwrecked men would be in danger of perishing in the night,
we came down upon the eastern extremity of the four planks
ivhich run the whole length of Provincetown street. This, which
is the last town on the Cape, lies mainly in one street along the
curving beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills, covered
with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, rise
immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, which is from
half a mile to a mile or more wide in the middle, and beyond
these is the desert, which is the greater part of its territory,
stretching to the sea on the east and west and north. The
town is compactly built in the narrow space, from ten to
fifty rods deep, between the harbor and the sand-hills, and
contained at that time about twenty-six hundred inhabitants.
The houses, in which a more modern and pretending style has
at length prevailed over the fisherman’s hut, stand on the
inner or plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses,
with the picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, on
the water side. The narrow portion of the beach between,
forming the street, about eighteen feet wide, the only one
where one carriage could pass another, if there was more than
one carriage in the town, looked much “heavier” than any
portion of the beach or the desert which we had walked on, it
being above the reach of the highest tide, and the sand being
kept loose by the occasional passage of a traveler. We learned
that the four planks on which we were walking had been
bought by the town’s share of the Surplus Revenue, the dis-
position of which was a bone of contention between the in-
habitants, till they wisely resolved thus to put it under foot.
Yet some, it was said, were so provoked because they did
not receive their particular share in money, that they persisted
in walking in the sand a long time after the sidewalk was
built. This is the only instance which I happen to know in
which the surplus revenue proved a blessing to any town. A
surplus revenue of dollars from the treasury to stem the
greater evil of a surplus revenue of sand from the ocean. They
expected to make a hard road by the time these planks were

CAPE COD 479

worn out. Indeed, they have already done so since we were
there, and have almost forgotten their sandy baptism.

As we passed along we observed the inhabitants engaged
in curing either fish or the coarse salt hay which they had
brought home and spread on the beach before their doors,
looking as yellow as if they had raked it out of the sea. The
front-yard plots appeared like what indeed they were, por-
tions of the beach fenced in, with beach-grass growing in them,
as if they were sometimes covered by the tide. You might still
pick up shells and pebbles there. There were a few trees among
the houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of-
Gileads ; and one man showed me a young oak which he had
transplanted from behind the town, thinking it an apple-tree.
But every man to his trade. Though he had little woodcraft,
he was not the less weather wise, and gave us one piece of in-
formation, viz., he had observed that when a thunder-cloud
came up v/ith a flood-tide it did not rain. This was the most
completely maritime town that we were ever in. It was merely
a good harbor, surrounded by land, dry if not firm, — an in-
habited beach, whereon fishermen cured and stored their fish,
without any back country. When ashore the inhabitants still
walk on planks. A few small patches have been reclaimed from
the swamps, containing commonly half a dozen square rods
only each. We saw one which was fenced with four lengths of
rail; also a fence made wholly of hogshead staves stuck in
the ground. These, and such as these, were all the cultivated
and cultivable land in Provincetown. We were told that there
were thirty or forty acres in all, but we did not discover a
quarter part so much, and that was well dusted with sand,
and looked as if the desert was claiming it. They are now
turning some of their swamps into Cranberry Meadows on
quite an extensive scale.

Yet far from being out of the way, Provincetown is directly
in the way of the navigator, and he is lucky who does not run
afoul of it in the dark. It is situated on one of the highways of

480 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
commerce, and men from all parts of the globe touch there
m the course of a year.

The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it being
Saturday night, excepting that division which had stood
down towards Chatham in the morning; and from a hill
where we went to see the sun set in the Bay, we counted two
hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the harbor
at various distances from the shore, and more were yet com-
ing round the Cape. As each came to anchor, it took in sail
and swung round in the wind, and lowered its boat. They
belonged chiefly to Wellfleet, Truro, and Cape Ann. This was
that city of canvas which we had seen hull down in the
horizon. Near at hand, and under bare poles, they were unex-
pectedly black-looking vessels, pe?iaivai vy] 8(;. A fisherman
told us that there were fifteen hundred vessels in the mackerel
fleet, and that he had counted three hundred and fifty in Prov-
incetown Harbor at one time. Being obliged to anchor at
a considerable distance from the shore on account of the
shallowness of the water, they made the impression of a
larger fleet than the vessels at the wharves of a large city.
As they had been manoeuvring out there all day seemingly for
our entertainment, while we were walking northwestward
along the Atlantic, so now we found them flocking into
Provincetown Harbor at night, just as we arrived, as if to
meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand. Standing by
Race Point and Long Point with various speed, they re-
minded me of fowls coming home to roost.

These were genuine New England vessels. It is stated in
the Journal of Moses Prince, a brother of the annalist, under
date of 1721, at which time he visited Gloucester, that the
first vessel of the class called schooner was built at Gloucester
about eight years before, by Andrew Robinson; and late in
the same century one Cotton Tufts gives us the tradition with
some particulars, which he learned on a visit to the same
place. According to the latter, Robinson having constructed
a vessel which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on

CAPE COD 4gl

her going off the stocks a by-stander cried out, *'Oh, how she
scoonsr' whereat Robinson replied, schooner let her bel^^
^^From which time,” says Tufts, ‘Vessels thus masted and
rigged have gone by the name of schooners; before which,
vessels of this description were not known in Europe.” ^ Yet
I can hardly believe this, for a schooner has always seemed
to me the typical vessel.

According to C. E. Potter of Manchester, New Hampshire^
the very word schooner is of New England origin, being from
the Indian schoon or scoot^ meaning to rush, as Schoodic,.
from scoot and auke, a place where water rushes. N. B. Some-
body of Gloucester was to read a paper on this matter before
a genealogical society in Boston, March 3, 1859, according to
the Boston Journal, q. v.

Nearly all who come out must walk on the four planks
which I have mentioned, so that you are pretty sure to meet
all the inhabitants of Provincetown who come out in the
course of a day, provided you keep out yourself. This evening
the planks were crowded with mackerel fishers, to whom we
gave and from whom we took the wall, as we returned to our
hotel. This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one
side of the door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to
be divided between carving meat and carving broadcloth.

The next morning, though it was still more cold and bluster-
ing than the day before, we took to the deserts again, for we
spent our days wholly out of doors, in the sun when there
was any, and in the wind which never failed. After threading
the shrubby hill-country at the southwest end of the town^
west of the Shank-Painter Swamp, whose expressive name —
for we understood it at first as a landsman naturally would — >
gave it importance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the
shore south of Race Point and three miles distant, and thence
roamed round eastward through the desert to where we had
left the sea the evening before. We traveled five or six miles

^ See Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. ix,, 1st series, and voL L, 4th series.

482 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
after we got out there, on a curving line, and might have
gone nine or ten, over vast platters of pure sand, from the
midst of which we could not see a particle of vegetation, ex-
cepting the distant thin fields of beach-grass, which crowned
and made the ridges toward which the sand sloped upward on
each side; — all the while in the face of a cutting wind as cold
as January; indeed, we experienced no weather so cold as this
for nearly two months afterward. This desert extends from
the extremity of the Cape, through Provincetown into Truro,
and many a time as we were traversing it we were reminded of
‘^Riley’s Narrative’’ of his captivity in the sands of Arabia,
notwithstanding the cold. Our eyes magnified the patches of
beach-grass into cornfields, in the horizon, and we probably
exaggerated the height of the ridges on account of the mirage.
I was pleased to learn afterward, from Kalm’s Travels in
North America, that the inhabi-axts of the Lower St. Law-
rence call this grass {Calamagrostis arenaria), and also Sea-
lyme grass (Elymus arenarius), seigle de mer; and he adds,
‘T have been assured that these plants grow in great plenty
in Newfoundland, and on other North American shores; the
places covered with them looking, at a distance, like corn-
fields; which might explain the passage in our northern ac-
counts [he wrote in 1749] of the excellent wine land [Vinland
det goda, Translator], which mentions that they had found
whole fields of wheat growing wild.”

The beach-grass is ‘Two to four feet high, of a sea-green
color,” and it is said to be widely diffused over the world. In
the Hebrides it is used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats,
etc. ; paper has been made of it at Dorchester in this State,
and cattle eat it when tender. It has heads somewhat like rye,
from six inches to a foot in length, and it is propagated both
by roots and seeds. To express its love for sand, some botanists
have called it Psamma arenaria, which is the Greek for sand,
qualified by the Latin for sandy, — or sandy sand. As it is
blown about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it

CAPE COD 483

describes myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they
were made by compasses.

It was the dreariest scenery imaginable. The only animals
which we saw ou the sand at that time were spiders, which are
to be found almost everywhere whether on snow or ice, water
or sand, — and a venomous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of
the myri-i,pods, or thousand-legs. We were surprised to see
spider-holes in that flowing sand with an edge as firm as that
of a stoned well.

In June this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles both
large and small, which had been out in the night, leading to
and from the swamps. I was told by a terrx filius who has a
^Tarm’’ on the edge of the desert, and is familiar with the fame
of Province town, that one man had caught twenty-five
snapping-turtles there the previous spring. His own method
of catching them was to put a toad on a mackerel-hook and
cast it into a pond, tying the line to a stump or stake on shore.
Invariably the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the
stump, and was found waiting there by his captor, however
long afterward. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes,
coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels. We
heard of sea-turtles as large as a barrel being found on the
bea' li and on East Harbor marsh, but whether they were
native there, or had been lost out of some vessel, did not ap-
pear. Perhaps they were the Salt-water Terrapin, or else the
Smooth Terrapin, found thus far north. Many toads were
met with where there was nothing but sand and beach-grass.
In Truro I had been surprised at the number of large light-
colored toads everywhere hopping over the dry and sandy
fields, their color corresponding to that of the sand. Snakes
also are common on these pure sand beaches, and I have never
been so much troubled by mosquitoes as in such localities. At
the same season strawberries grew there abundantly in the
little hollows on the edge of the desert, standing amid the
beach-grass in the sand, and the fruit of the shad-bush or
Amelanchier, which the inhabitants call Josh-pears (some

484 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
think from juic}^?), is very abundant on the hills. I fell in
with an obliging man who conducted me to the best locality
for strawberries. He said that he would not have shown me
the place if he had not seen that I was a stranger, and could
not anticipate him another year; I therefore feel bound in
honor not to reveal it. When we came to a pond, he being
the native did the honors and carried me over on his shoulders,
like Sindbad. One good turn deserves another, and if he ever
comes our way, I will do as much for him.

In one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees project-
ing through the otherwise uninterrupted desert, where, as we
afterward learned, thirty or forty years before a flourishing
forest had stood, and now, as the trees were laid bare from
year to year, the inhabitants cut off their tops for fuel.

We saw nobody that day outside of the town; it was too
wintry for such as had seen the back side before, or for the
greater number who never desire to see it, to venture out; and
we saw hardly a track to show that any had ever crossed this
desert. Yet I was told that some are always out on the back
side night and day in severe weather, looking for wrecks,
in order that they may get the job of discharging the cargo,
or the like, — and thus shipwrecked men are succored. But,
generally speaking, the inhabitants rarely visit these sands.
One who had lived in Provincetown thirty years told me that
he had not been through to the north side within that time.
Sometimes the natives themselves come near perishing by
losing their way in snow-storms behind the town.

The wind was not a Sirocco or Simoon, such as we asso-
ciate with the desert, but a New England northeaster, — and
we sought shelter in vain under the sand-hills, for it blew all
about them, rounding them into cones, and was sure to find
us out on whichever side we sat. From time to time we lay
down and drank at little pools in the sand, filled with pure,
fresh water, all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp.
The air was filled with dust like snow, and cutting sand which
made the face tingle, and we saw what it must be to face it

CAPE COD 485

when the weather was drier, and, if possible, windier still, —
to face a migrating sand-bar in the air, which has picked up
its duds and is off, — to be whipped with a cat, not o^ nine-tails,
but of a myriad of tails, and each one a sting to it. A Mr.
Whitman, a former minister of Wellfleet, used to write to his
inland friends that the blowing sand scratched the windows so
that he was obliged to have one new pane set every week, that
he might see out.

On the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the ap-
pearance of an inundation which was overwhelming them, ter-
minating in an abrupt bank many feet higher than the surface
on which they stood, and having partially buried the outside
trees. The moving sand-hills of England, called Dunes, or
Downs, to which these have been likened, are either formed of
sand cast up by the sea, or of sand taken from the land itself
in the first place by the wind, and driven still farther inward.
It is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly
flowing from the sea toward the town. The northeast winds
are said to be the strongest, but the northwest to move most
sand, because they are the driest. On the shore of the Bay of
Biscay, many villages were formerly destroyed in this way.
Some of the ridges of beach-grass which we saw were planted
by government many years ago, to preserve the harbor of
Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. I talked with
some who had been employed in the planting. In the “Descrip-
tion of the Eastern Coast,’’ which I have already referred to,
it is said: “Beach-grass during the spring and summer grows
about two feet and a half. If surrounded by naked beach, the
storms of autumn and winter heap up the sand on all sides, and
cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant. In the ensuing
spring the grass sprouts anew ; is again covered with sand in
the winter ; and thus a hill or ridge continues to ascend as long
as there is a sufficient base to support it, or till the circum-
scribing sand, being also covered with beach-grass, will no
longer yield to the force of the winds.” Sand-hills formed in
this way are sometimes one hundred feet high and of every

486 THE WRITINGS QJ^ THOREAU
variety of form, like snow-drifts, or Arab tents, and are con-
tinually shifting. The grass roots itself very firmly. When I
endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off ten inches or
a foot below the surface, at what had been the surface the
year before, as appeared by the numerous offshoots there, it
being a straight, hard, round shoot, showing by its length how
much the sand had accumulated the last year ; and sometimes
the dead stubs of a previous .:eason were pulled up with it
from still deeper in the sand, with their own more decayed
shoot attached, — ^so that the age of a sand-hill, and its rate of
increase for several years, are pretty accurately recorded in
this way.

The wind blowed so hard from the northeast, that, cold as
it was, we resolved to see the breakers on the Atlantic side,
whose din we had heard all the morning; so we kept on east-
ward through the desert, till we struck the shore again north-
east of Provincetown, and exposed ourselves to the full force
of the piercing blast. There are extensive shoals there over
which the sea broke with great force. For half a mile from
the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the
wind, made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves
speak. Of this part of the coast it is said: ‘‘A northeast storm,
the most violent and fatal to seamen, as it is frequently ac-
companied with snow, blows directly on the land: a strong
current sets along the shore: add to which that ships, during
the operation of such a storm, endeavor to work northward,
that they may get into the bay. Should they be unable to
weather Race Point, the wind drives them on the shore, and
a shipwreck is inevitable. Accordingly, the strand is every-
where covered with the fragments of vessels.’’ But since the
Highland Light was erected, this part of the coast is less dan-
gerous, and it is said that more shipwrecks occur south of
That light, where they were scarcely known before.

This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed, — more tumuU

CAPE COD 487

tuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara,
and, of course, on a far greater scale. It was the ocean in a
gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail in sight, which
labored much, as if it were anxiously seeking a harbor. It
was high tide when we reached the shore, and in one place,
for a considerable distance, each wave dashed up so high
that it was difficult to pass between it and the bank. Further
south, where the bank was higher, it would have been dan-
gerous to attempt it. A native of the Cape has told me, that
many years ago, three boys, his playmates, having gone to
this beach in Wellfleet to visit a wreck, when the sea receded
ran down to the wreck, and when it came in ran before it to
the bank, but the sea following fast at their heels, caused the
bank to cave and bury them alive.

It was the roaring sea, ^dXaooa f]xi]eaoa, —

dji(/)i 5 e t’ ax/)ai

’FIiovEg ^oowaiv, kpEvyo\iivy\(; dXog eico.

And the summits of the bank
Around resound, the sea being vomited forth.

As we stood looking on this scene we were gradually con-
vinced that fishing here and in a pond were not, in all respects,
the same, and that he who waits for fair weather and a calm
sea may never see the glancing skin of a mackerel, and get
no nearer to a cod than the wooden emblem in the State
House.

Having lingered on the shore till we were well-nigh chilled
to death by the wind, and were ready to take shelter in a
Charity-house, we turned our weather-beaten faces toward
Provincetown and the Bay again, having now more than
doubled the Cape,

PROVINCETOWN

Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house near our
hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out
the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. They
told me that a vessel had lately come in from the Banks with
forty-four thousand cod-fish. Timothy Dwight says that, just
before he arrived at Provincetown, ^‘a schooner came in from
the Great Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, almost one thou-
sand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the
main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in
calm weather.” The cod in this fish-house, just out of the
pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men
stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the
barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point.
One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeat-
edly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he
will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the
same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna. ^^How long
does it take to cure these fish?” I asked.

‘Two good drying days, sir,” was the answer.

I walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast,
and mine host inquired if I would take “hashed fish or beans.”
I took beans, though they never were a favorite dish of mine.
I found next summer that this was still the only alternative
proposed here, and the landlord was still ringing the changes
on these two words. In the former dish there was a remarkable
proportion of fish. As you travel inland the potato predomi-
nates. It chanced that I did not taste fresh fish of any kind
on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so much
used there as in the country. That is where they are cured,

488

CAPE COD 489

and where, sometimes, travelers are cured of eating them. No
fresh meat was slaughtered in Provincetown, but the little
that was used at the public houses was brought from Boston
by the steamer.

A great many of the houses here were surrounded by fish-
flakes close up to the sills on all sides, with only a narrow
passage two or three feet wide, to the front door; so that
instead of looking out into a flower or grass plot, you looked
on to so many square rods of cod turned wrong side outwards.
These parterres were said to be like a flower-garden in a
good drying day in midsummer. There were flakes of every
age and pattern, and some so rusty and overgrown with
lichens that they looked as if they might have served the
founders of the fishery here. Some had broken down under
the weight of successive harvests. The principal employment
of the inhabitants at this time seemed to be to trundle out
their fish and spread them in the morning, and bring them in
at night. I saw how many a loafer who chanced to be out
early enough, got a job at wheeling out the fish of his neigh-
bor who was anxious to improve the whole of a fair day. Now
then I knew where salt fish were caught. They were every-
where lying on their backs, their collarbones standing out
like the lapels of a man-o’-war-man’s jacket, and inviting all
things to come and rest in their bosoms; and all things, with
a few exceptions, accepted the invitation. I think, by the way,
that if you should wrap a large salt fish round a small boy, he
would have a coat of such a fashion as I have seen many a
one wear to muster. Salt fish were stacked up on the wharves,
looking like corded wood, maple and yellow birch with the
bark left on. I mistook them for this at first, and such in one
sense they were, — fuel to maintain our vital fires, — ^an eastern
wood which grew on the Grand Banks. Some were stacked in
the form of huge flower-pots, being laid in small circles with
the tails outwards, each circle successively larger than the
preceding until the pile was three or four feet high, when
the circles rapidly diminished, so as to form a conical roof<

490 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
On the shores of New Brunswick this is covered with birch-
baxk, and stones are placed upon it, and, being thus rendered
impervious to the rain, it is left to season before being packed
for exportation.

It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes
fed on cod’s heads! The godlike part of the cod, which, like
the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth
has but little less brain in it, — coming to such an end 1 to be
craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack from sympathy.
What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows
of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the
ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and
instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal! — However,
an inhabitant assured me that they did not make a practice of
feeding cows on cod’s heads ; the cows mei ely would eat them
sometimes, but I might live there all my days and never see
it done. A cow wanting salt would also sometimes lick out all
the soft part of a cod on the flakes. This he would have me
believe was the foundation of this fish-story.

It has been a constant traveler’s tale and perhaps slander,
now for thousands of years, the Latins and Greeks have re-
peated it, that this or that nation feeds its cattle, or horses,
or sheep, on fish, as may be seen in iElian and Pliny, but in
the Journal of Nearchus, who was Alexander’s admiral, and
made a voyage from the Indus to the Euphrates three hun-
dred and twenty-six years before Christ, it is said that the
inhabitants of a portion of the intermediate coast, whom he
called Ichthyophagi or Fisheaters, not only ate fishes raw and
also dried and pounded in a whale’s vertebra for a mortar
and niade into a paste, but gave them to their cattle, there
being no grass on the coast ; and several modern travelers, —
Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others make the same report. There-
fore in balancing the evidence I am still in doubt about the
Provincetown cows. As for other domestic animals. Captain
King, in his continuation of Captain Cook’s Journal in 1779,
s?ys of the dogs of Kamtschatka, “Their food in the winter

CAPE COD 491

consists entirely of the head, entrails, and backbones oi
salmon, which are put aside and dried for that purpose; and
with this diet they are fed but sparingly.’’ ^

As we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert what
Pliny says, — that ‘‘the commanders of the fleets of Alexander
the Great have related that the Gedrosi, who dwell on the
banks of the river Arabis, are in the habit of making the doors
of their houses with the jawbones of fishes, and raftering the
roofs with their bones.” Strabo tells the same of the
Ichthyophagi. “Hardouin remarks, that the Basques of his
day were in the habit of fencing their gardens with the ribs
of the whale, which sometimes exceeded twenty feet in
length; and Cuvier says, that at the present time the jawbone
of the whale is used in Norway for the purpose of making
beams or posts for buildings.” ^ Herodotus says the inhabi-
tants on Lake Prasias in Thrace (living on piles), “give fish
for fodder to their horses and beasts of burden.”

Provincetown was apparently what is called a flourishing
town. Some of the inhabitants asked me if I did not think
that they appeared to be well off generally. I said that I did,
and asked how many there were in the almshouse. “Oh, only
one or two, infirm or idiotic,” answered they. The outward
aspect of the houses and shops frequently suggested a poverty
which their interior comfort and even richness disproved*
You might meet a lady daintily dressed in the Sabbath morn-
ing, wading in among the sand-hills, from church, where there
appeared no house fit to receive her, yet no doubt the interior
of the house answered to the exterior of the lady. As for the
interior of the inhabitants I am still in the dark about it. ]
had a little intercourse with some whom I met in the street,
and was often agreeably disappointed by discovering the intel-
ligence of rough, and what would be considered unpromising,
specimens. Nay, I ventured to call on one citizen the next

1 Cook’s Journal, vol. vii. p. 315.

2 Bohn’s ed. trans. of Pliny, vol. ii. p. 361.

492 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
summer, by special invitation. I found him sitting in his front
doorway, that Sabbath evening, prepared for me to come in
unto him; but unfortunately for his reputation for keeping
open house, there was stretched across his gateway a circular
cobweb of the largest kind and quite entire. This looked so
ominous that I actually turned aside and went in the back
way.

This Monday morning was beautifully mild and calm, both
on land and water, promising us a smooth passage across the
Bay, and the fishermen feared that it would not be so good a
drying day as the cold and windy one which preceded it.
There could hardly have been a greater contrast. This was the
first of the Indian Summer days, though at a late hour in the
morning we found the wells in the sand behind the town
still covered with ice, which had formed in the night. What
with wind and sun my most prominent feature fairly cast
its slough. But I assure you it will take more than two good
drying days to cure me of rambling. After making an excur-
sion among the hills in the neighborhood of the Shank-Painter
Swamp, and getting a little work done in its line, we took our
seat upon the highest sand-hill overlooking the town, in mid-
air, on a long plank stretched across between two hillocks of
sand, where some boys were endeavoring in vain to fly their
kite; and there we remained the rest of that forenoon looking
out over the placid harbor, and watching for the first ap-
pearance of the steamer from Wellfleet, that we might be
in readiness to go on board when we heard the whistle off
Long Point.

We got what we could out of the boys in the meanwhile.
Provincetown boys are of course all sailors and have sailors’
eyes. When we were at the Highland Light the last summer,
seven or eight miles from Provincetown Harbor, and wished
to know one Sunday morning if the Olata, a well-known yacht,
had got in from Boston, so that we could return in her, a
Provincetown boy about ten years old, who chanced to be
at the table, remarked that she had. I asked him how he

CAPE COD 493

j&new. just saw her come in/’ said he. When I expressed
surprise that he could distinguish her from other vessels so
far, he said that there were not so many of those two-topsail
schooners about but that he could tell her. Palfrey said, in his
oration at Barnstable, ^The duck does not take to the water
with a surer instinct than the Barnstable boy. [He might have
said the Cape Cod boy as well.] He leaps from his leading-
strings into the shrouds. It is but a bound from the mother’s
lap to the masthead. He boxes the compass in his infant solilo-
quies. He can hand, reef, and steer by the time he flies a kite.”

This was the very day one would have chosen to sit upon
a hill overlooking sea and land, and muse there. The mackerel
fleet was rapidly taking its departure, one schooner after
another, and standing round the Cape, like fowls leaving their
roosts in the morning to disperse themselves in distant fields.
The turtle-like sheds of the salt-works were crowded into
every nook in the hills, immediately behind the town, and
their now idle wind-mills lined the shore. It was worth the
while to see by what coarse and simple chemistry this almost
necessary of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman,
and a single apprentice to do the chores for a large establish-
ment. It is a sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the sunniest
season; more interesting than gold or diamond-washing,
which, I fancy, it somewhat resembles at a distance. In the
production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough
to assist man. So at the potash works which I have seen at
Hull, where they burn the stems of the kelp and boil the
ashes. Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you
have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory. It is
said, that owing to the reflection of the sun from the sand-
hills, and there being absolutely no fresh water emptying into
the harbor, the same number of superficial feet yields more
salt here than in any other part of the country. A little rain
is considered necessary to clear the air, and make salt fast
and good, for as paint does not dry, so water does not evapo-
rate, in dog-day weather. But they were now, as elsewhere on

494 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

the Cape, breaking up their salt-works and selling them for

lumber.

From that elevation we could overlook the operations of
the inhabitants almost as completely as if the roofs had been
taken off. They were busily covering the wicker-work flakes
about their houses with salted fish, and we now saw that the
back yards were improved for this purpose as much as the
front; where one man’s fish ended another’s began. In al-
most every yard we detected some little building from which
these treasures were being trundled forth and systematically
spread, and we saw that there was an art as well as a knack
even in spreading fish, and that a division of labor was
profitably practiced. One man was withdrawing his fishes a
few inches beyond the nose of his neighbor’s cow which had
stretched her neck over a paling to get at them. It seemed a
quite domestic employment, like drying clothes, and indeed
in some parts of the county the women take part in it.

I noticed in several places on the Cape a sort of clothes-
flakes. They spread brush on the ground, and fence it round,
and then lay their clothes on it, to keep them from the sand.
This is a Cape Cod clothes-yard.

The sand is the great enemy here. The tops of some of the
hills were inclosed and a board put up forbidding all persons
entering the inclosure, lest their feet should disturb the sand,
and set it a-blowing or a-sliding. The inhabitants are obliged
to get leave from the authorities to cut wood behind the town
for fish-flakes, bean-poles, pea-brush, and the like, though, as
we were told, they may transplant trees from one part of the
township to another without leave. The sand drifts like snow,
and sometimes the lower story of a house is concealed by it,
though it is kept off by a wall. The houses were formerly
built on piles, in order that the driving sand might pass under
them. We saw a few old ones here still standing on their piles,
but they were boarded up now, being protected by their
younger neighbors. There was a school-house, just under the
hill on which we sat, filled with sand up to the tops of the

CAPE COD 495

desks, and of course the master and scholars had fled. Per*
haps they had imprudently left the windows open one day,
or neglected to mend a broken pane. Yet in one place was
advertised ^^Fine sand for sale here,’^ — I could hardly believe
my eyes, — probably some of the street sifted, — a good in-
stance of the fact that a man confers a value on the most
worthless thing by mixing himself with it, according to which
rule we must have conferred a value on the whole back side
of Cape Cod; — but I thought that if they could have adver-
tised “Fat Soil,’’ or perhaps “Fine sand got rid of,” ay, and
“Shoes emptied here,” it would have been more alluring. As
we looked down on the town, I thought that I saw one man,
who probably lived beyond the extremity of the planking,
steering and tacking for it in a sort of snow-shoes, but I may
have been mistaken. In some pictures of Provincetown the
persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the angles,
so much being supposed to be buried in the sand. Neverthe-
less, natives of Provincetown assured me that they could walk
in the middle of the road without trouble even in slippers,
for they had learned how to put their feet down and lift them
up without taking in any sand. One man said that he should
be surprised if he found half a dozen grains of sand in his
pumps at night, and stated, moreover, that the young ladies
had a dexterous way of emptying their shoes at each step,
which it would take a stranger a long time to learn. The tires
of the stage-wheels were about five inches wide; and the
wagon- tires generally on the Cape are an inch or two wider,
as the sand is an inch or two deeper than elsewhere. I saw a
baby’s wagon with tires six inches wide to keep it near the
surface. The more tired the wheels, the less tired the horses.
Yet all the time that we were in Provincetown, which was
two days and nights, we saw only one horse and cart, and
they were conveying a coffin. They did not try such experi-
ments there on common occasions. The next summer I saw
only the two-wheeled horse-cart which conveyed me thirty
rods into the harbor on my way to the steamer. Yet we read

496 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
that there were two horses and two yoke of oxen here in 1794
and we were told that there were several more when we were
there, beside the stage team. In Barber^s Historical Collections,
it is said, “so rarely are wheel-carriages seen in the place that
they are a matter of some curiosity to the younger part of
the community. A lad who understood navigating the ocean
much better than land travel, on seeing a man driving a
wagon in the street, expressed his surprise at his being able
to drive so straight without the assistance of a rudder.’’ There
was no rattle of carts, and there would have been no rattle if
there had been any carts. Some saddle horses that passed the
hotel in the evening merely made the sand fly with a rustling
sound like a writer sanding his paper copiously, but there
was no sound of their tread. No doubt there are more horses
and carts there at present. A sleigh is never seen, or at least
is a great novelty on the Cape, the snow being either absorbed
by the sand or blown into drifts.

Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Cape generally do not
complain of their “soil,” but will tell you that it is good
enough for them to dry their fish on.

Notwithstanding all this sand, we counted three meeting-
houses, and four school-houses nearly as large, on this street,
though some had a tight board fence about them to preserve
the plot within level and hard. Similar fences, even within
a foot of many of the houses, gave the town a less cheerful
and hospitable appearance than it would otherwise have had.
They told us that, on the whole, the sand had made no prog-
ress for the last ten years, the cows being no longer permitted
to go at large, and every means being taken to stop the sandy
tide.

In 1727 Provincetown was “invested with peculiar privi-
leges,” for its encouragement. Once or twice it was nearly
abandoned; but now lots on the street fetch a high price,
though titles to them were first obtained by possession and
improvement, and they are still transferred by quit-claim
deeds merely, the township being the property of the State.

CAPE COD 497

But though lots were so valuable on the street, you might in
many places throw a stone over them to where a man could
3 till obtain land or sand by squatting on or improving it.

Stones are very rare on the Cape. I saw a very few small
stones used for pavements and for bank walls, in one or two
places in my walk, but they are so scarce, that, as I was in-
formed, vessels have been forbidden to take them from the
beach for ballast, and therefore their crews used to land at
night and steal them. I did not hear of a rod of regular stone
wall below Orleans. Yet I saw one man underpinning a new
house in Eastham with some ^^rocks,’’ as he called them, which
he said a neighbor had collected with great pains in the course
of years, and finally made over to him. This I thought was a
gift worthy of being recorded, — equal to a transfer of Cali-
fornia “rocks,” almost. Another man who was assisting him,
and who seemed to be a close observer of nature, hinted to me
the locality of a rock in that neighborhood which was “forty-
two paces in circumference and fifteen feet high,” for he saw
that I was a stranger, and, probably, would not carry it off.
Yet I suspect that the locality of the few large rocks on the
forearm of the Cape is well known to the inhabitants generally.
I even met with one man who had got a smattering of min-
eralogy, but where he picked it up I could not guess. I thought
that he would meet with some interesting geological nuts for
him to crack, if he should ever visit the mainland, — Cohasset
or Marblehead, for instance.

The well stones at the Highland Light were brought from
Hingham, but the wells and cellars of the Cape are generally
built of brick, which also are imported. The cellars, as well
as the wells, are made in a circular form, to prevent the sand
from pressing in the wall. The former are only from nine to
twelve feet in diameter, and are said to be very cheap, since a
single tier of brick will suffice for a cellar of even larger
dimensions. Of course, if you live in the sand, you will not
require a large cellar to hold your roots. In Provincetown,
when formerly they suffered the sand to drive under their

498 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
houses^ obliterating all rudiment of a cellar, they did not
raise a vegetable to put into one. One farmer in Welltleet, who
raised fifty bushels of potatoes, showed me his cellar under
a corner of his house, not more than nine feet in diameter,
looking like a cistern; but he had another of the same size
under his barn.

You need dig only a few feet almost anywhere near the
shore of the Cape to ftnd fresh water. But that which we tasted
was invariably poor, though the inhabitants called it good, as
if they were comparing it with salt water. In the account of
Truro, it is said, “Wells dug near the shore are dry at low
water, or rather at what is called young flood, but are re-
plenished with the flowing of the tide,’’ — the salt water,
which is lowest in the sand, apparently forcing the fresh up.
When you express your surprise at the greenness of a Prov-
incetown garden on the beach, in a dry season, they will
sometimes tell you that the tide forces the moisture up to
them. It is an interesting fact that low sand-bars in the midst
of the ocean, perhaps even those which are laid bare only at
low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water, at which the thirsty
mariner can supply himself. They appear, like huge sponges,
to hold the rain and dew which fall on them, and which, by
capillary attraction, are prevented from mingling with the
surrounding brine.

The Harbor of Provincetown — ^which, as well as the greater
part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked
from our perch — is deservedly famous. It opens to the south,
is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the
only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or
Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “the storms which prevail
on the American coast generally come from the east; and
there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hun-
dred miles.” J. D. Graham, who has made a very minute and
thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states
that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and
the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to

CAPE COD 499

render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.^’
It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Mas-
sachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years
at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John
Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name
of Milford tiaven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s
Bay. His Highness Prince Charles changed the name of Cape
Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power
to change a name for the worse, and, as Cotton Mather said,
Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose tiU
shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

The places which I have described may seem strange and
remote to my townsmen, — indeed, from Boston to Province-
town is twice as far as from England to France; yet step into
the cars, and in six hours you may stand on those four planks,
and see the Cape which Gosnold is said to have discovered,
and which I have so poorly described. If you had started when
I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand,
still fresh, and reaching all the way from the Nauset lights to
Race Point, some thirty miles, — for at every step we made an
impression on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and
though our account may have made no impression on your
minds. But what is our account? In it there is no roar, no
beach-birds, no tow-cloth.

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches, —
at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their
sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and the bay-
berries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of drift-
wood or a few beach-plums, and their music the surf and the
peep of the beach-bird.

We went to see the Ocean, and that is probably the best
place of all our coast to go to. If you go by water, you may
experience what it is to leave and to approach these shores;
you may see the Stormy Petrel by the way, ^aXaaao8p6|xa,

500 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
running over the sea, and if the weather is but a little thick,
may lose sight of the land in midpassage. I do not know where
there is another beach in the Atlantic States, attached to the
mainland, so long, and at the same time so straight, and com-
pletely uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers
or marshes ; for though there may be clear places on the map,
they would probably be found by the foot traveler to be
intersected by creeks and marshes; certainly there is none
where there is a double way, such as I have described, a beach
and a bank, which at the same time shows you the land and
the sea, and part of the time two seas. The Great South Beach
of Long Island, which I have since visited, is longer still with-
out an inlet, but it is literally a mere sand-bar, exposed, several
miles from the island, and not the edge of a continent wasting
before the assaults of the ocean. Though wild and desolate,
as it wants the bold bank, it possesses but half the grandeur
of Cape Cod in my eyes, nor is the imagination contented
with its southern aspect. The only other beaches of great
length on our Atlantic coast, which I have heard sailors
speak of, are those of Barnegat on the Jersey shore, and Cur-
rituck between Virginia and North Carolina; but these, like
the last, are low and narrow sand-bars, lying off the coast, and
separated from the mainland by lagoons. Besides, as you go
farther south the tides are feebler, and cease to add variety
and grandeur to the shore. On the Pacific side of our country
also no doubt there is good walking to be found; a recent
writer and dweller there tells us that “the coast from Cape
Disappointment (or the Columbia River) to Cape Flattery
(at the Strait of Juan de Fuca) is nearly north and south, and
can be traveled almost its entire length on a beautiful sand-
beach,’’ with the exception of two bays, four or five rivers,
and a few points jutting into the sea. The common shell-fish
found there seem to be often of corresponding types, if not
identical species, with those of Cape Cod. The beach which J
have described, however, is not hard enough for carriages, but
must be explored on foot. When one carriage has passed along^

Cape cod 501

a following one sinks deeper still in its rut. It has at present
no name any more than fame. That portion south of Nauset
Harbor is commonly called Chatham Beach. The part in
Eastham is called Nauset Beach, and off Wellfleet and Truro
the back side, or sometimes, perhaps. Cape Cod Beach. I think
that part which extends without interruption from Nauset
Harbor to Race Point should be called Cape Cod Beach, and
do so speak of it.

One of the most attractive points for visitors is in the
northeast part of Wellfleet, where accommodations (I mean
for men and women of tolerable health and habits) could
probably be had within half a mile of the seashore. It best
combines the country and the seaside. Though the Ocean is
out of sight, its faintest murmur is audible, and you have only
to climb a hill to find yourself on its brink. It is but a step from
the glassy surface of the Herring Ponds to the big Atlantic
Pond where the waves never cease to break. Or perhaps the
Highland Light in Truro may compete with this locality, for
there there is a more uninterrupted view of the Ocean and
the Bay, and in the summer there is always some air stirring
on the edge of the bank there, so that the inhabitants know
not what hot weather is. As for the view, the keeper of the
light, with one or more of his family, walks out to the edge
of the bank after every meal to look off, just as if they had not
lived there all their days. In short, it will wear well. And what
pictures will you substitute for that, upon your walls? Bui
ladies cannot get down the bank there at present without the
aid of a block and tackle.

Most persons visit the seaside in warm weather, when fogs
are frequent, and the atmosphere is wont to be thick, and
the charm of the sea is to some extent lost. But I suspect that
the fall is the best season, for then the atmosphere is more
transparent, and it is a greater pleasure to look out over the
sea. The clear and bracing air, and the storms of autumn and
winter even, are necessary in order that we may get the im-
pression which the sea is calculated to make. In October,

S02 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
when the weather is not intolerably cold, and the landscape
wears its autumnal tints, such as, methinks, only a Cape Cod
landscape ever wears, especially if you have a storm during
your stay, — ^that I am convinced is the best time to visit this
shore. In autumn, even in August, the thoughtful days begin,
and we can walk anywhere with profit. Beside, an outward
cold and dreariness, which make it necessary to seek shelter
at night, lend a spirit of adventure to a walk.

The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort
for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside.
At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and
probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it. is merely
a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-
julep, that the visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of
the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, — I
trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But
this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such
beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a
day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn
and Nantasket 1 this bare and bended arm it is that makes the
bay in which they lie so snugly. What are springs and water-
falls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of water-
falls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a
(ight-house or a hsherman^s hut the true hotel. A man may
itand there and put all America behind him.

THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH

{This essay is the last of the three in The Maine
Woods, a volume edited by Ellery Channing and pub-
lished after Thoreau's death, in 1864, Thoteau made
the journey in 1857 in company with his fellow
townsman, Edward Hoar, Although the narrative
was never published during his lifetime, Thoreau
wrote it at some length in his journal, perhaps intend-
ing to use it in an extended work about the Indians,
The following pages are a condensation of the nar^
rative,\

THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH

I STARTED on my third excursion to the Maine woods Monday,
June 20, 1857, with one companion, arriving at Bangor the
next day at noon. We had hardly left the steamer, when we
passed Molly Molasses in the street. As long as she lives, the
Penobscots may be considered extant as a tribe. The succeed-
ing morning, a relative of mine, who is well acquainted with
the Penobscot Indians, and who had been my companion in
my two previous excursions into the Maine woods, took me
in his wagon to Oldtown, to assist me in obtaining an Indian
for this expedition. We were ferried across to the Indian
Island in a batteau. The ferryman’s boy had got the key to it,
but the father, who was a blacksmith, after a little hesitation
cut the chain with a cold-chisel on the rock. He told me that
the Indians were nearly all gone to the seaboard and to INIas-
sachusetts, partly on account of the small-pox, of which they
are very much afraid, it having broken out in Oldtown, and it
was doubtful whether we should find a suitable one at home.
The old chief Neptune, however, was there still. The first man
we saw on the island was an Indian named Joseph Polis,
whom my relative had known from a boy, and now addressed
familiarly as “Joe.” He was dressing a deer-skin in his yard.
The skin was spread over a slanting log, and he was scraping
it with a stick, held by both hands. He was stoutly built, per-
haps a little above the middle height, with a broad face, and,
as others said, perfect Indian features and complexion. His
house was a two-story white one, with blinds, the best looking
that I noticed there, and as good as an average one on a New
England village street. It was surrounded by a garden and

SOS

506 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fruit-trees, single cornstalks standing thinly amid the beans.
We asked him if he knew any good Indian who would like to
go into the woods with us, that is, to the Allegash Lakes, by
way of Moosehead, and return by the East Branch of the
Penobscot, or vary from this as we f)leased. To which he an-
swered, out of that strange remoteness in which the Indian
ever dwells to the white man, ^^Me like to go myself; me want
to get some moose;” and kept on scraping the skin. His
brother had been into the woods with my relative only a year
or two before, and the Indian now inquired what the latter
had done to him, that he did not come back, for he had not
seen nor heard from him since.

At length we got round to the more interesting topic again.
The ferryman had told us that all the best Indians were gone
mept Polis, who was one of the aristocracy. He to be sure
would be the best man we could have, but if he went at all
TOuld want a great price; so we did not expect to get him.
Polis asked at first two dollars a day, but agreed to go for a
dollar and a half, and fifty cents a week for his canoe. He
would come to Bangor with his canoe by the seven, o’clock
train that evening, — ^we might depend on him. We thought
j)urselves lucky to secure the services of this man, who was
known to be particularly steady and trustworthy.

I spent the afternoon with my companion, who had re-
mained in Bangor, in preparing for our expedition, purchasing
provisions, hard bread, pork, coffee, sugar, etc., and some
India-rubber clothing.

We had at first thought of exploring the St. John from its
source to its mouth, or else to go up the Penobscot by its East
Branch to the lakes of the St. John, and return by way of
Chesuncook and Moosehead. We had finally inclined to the
last route, only reversing the order of it, going by way of
Moosehead, and returning by the Penobscot, otherwise it
would have been all the way up stream and taken twice as
long.

At evening the Indian arrived in the cars, and I led the way

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 507
while he followed me three quarters of a mile to my friend’s
house, with the canoe on his head. I did not know the exact
route myself, but steered by the lay of the land, as I do in
Boston, and I tried to enter into conversation with him, but as
he was puffing under the weight of his canoe, not having the
usual apparatus for carrying it, but, above all, was an Indian,
I might as well have been thumping on the bottom of his
birch the while. In answer to the various observations which
I made by way of breaking the ice, he only grunted vaguely
from beneath his canoe once or twice, so that I knew he was
there.

Our little canoe, so neat and strong, drew a favorable
criticism from all the wiseacres among the tavern loungers
along the road. By the roadside, close to the wheels, I noticed
a splendid great purple- fringed orchis with a spike as big as
an epilobium, which I would fain have stopped the stage to
pluck, but as this had never been known to stop a bear, like
the cur on the stage, the driver would probably have thought
it a waste of time.

When we reached the lake, about half past eight in the
evening, it was still steadily raining, and harder than before;
and, in that fresh, cool atmosphere, the hylodes were peeping
and the toads singing about the lake universally, as in the
spring with us. It was as if the season had revolved backward
two or three months, or I had arrived at the abode of perpetual
spring.

We had expected to go upon the lake at once, and, after
paddling up two or three miles, to camp on one of its islands;
but on account of the steady and increasing rain, we decided
to go to one of the taverns for the night, though, for my own
part, I should have preferred to camp out.

About four o’clock the next morning (July 24), though it
was quite cloudy, accompanied by the landlord to the water’s
edge, in the twilight, we launched our canoe from a rock on

508 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the Moosehead Lake. When I was there four years before, we
had a rather small canoe for three persons, and I had thought
that this time I would get a larger one, but the present one was
even smaller than that. It was 18}i feet long by 2 feet 6^4
inches wide in the middle, and one foot deep within, so I
found by measurement, and I judged that it would weigh not
far from eighty pounds. The Indian had recently made it him-
self, and its smallness was partly compensated for by its new-
ness, as well as stanchness and solidity, it being made of very
thick bark and ribs. Our baggage weighed about 166 pounds,
so that the canoe carried about 600 pounds in all, or the
weight of four men. The principal part of the baggage was, as
usual, placed in the middle of the broadest part, while we
stowed ourselves in the chinks and crannies that were left
before and behind it, where there was no room to extend our
legs, the loose articles being tucked into the ends. The canoe
was thus as closely packed as a market-basket, and might pos-
sibly have been upset without spilling any of its contents.
The Indian sat on a cross-bar in the stern, but we flat on the
bottom, with a splint or chip behind our backs, to protect them
from the cross-bar, and one of us commonly paddled with the
Indian. He foresaw that we should not want a pole till we
reached the Umbazookskus River, it being either dead water
or down stream so far, and he was prepared to make a sail of
his blanket in the bows if the wind should be fair ; but we never
used it.

It had rained more or less the four previous days, so that we
thought we might count on some fair weather. The wind was
at first southwesterly.

Paddling along the eastern side of the lake in the still of
the morning, we soon saw a few sheldrakes, which the Indian
called Shecorways^ and some peetweets, Naramekechus, on
the rocky shore; we also saw and heard loons, Medawisla,
which he said was a sign of wind. It was inspiriting to hear
the regular dip of the paddles, as if they were our fins or
flippers, and to realize that we were at length fairly embarked.

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 509
We who had felt strangely as stage-passengers and tavern-
lodgers were suddenly naturalized there and presented with
the freedom of the lakes and the woods. Having passed the
small rocky isles within two or three miles of the foot of the
lake, we had a short consultation respecting our course, and
inclined to the western shore for the sake of its lee; for other-
wise, if the wind should rise, it would be impossible for us to
reach Mount Kineo, which is about midway up the lake on
the east side, but at its narrowest part, where probably we
could recross if we took the western side. The wind is the
chief obstacle to crossing the lakes, especially in so small a
canoe. The Indian remarked several times that he did not
like to cross the lakes “in littlum canoe,” but nevertheless,
“just as we say, it made no odds to him.” He sometimes took
a straight course up the middle of the lake between Sugar
and Deer Islands, when there was no wind.

Measured on the map, Moosehead Lake is twelve miles
wide at the widest place, and thirty miles long in a direct line,
but longer as it lies. The captain of the steamer called h
thirty-eight miles as he steered. We should probably go about
forty. The Indian said that it was called ^'Mspame, because
large water.’’ Squaw Mountain rose darkly on our left, near the
outlet of the Kennebec, and what the Indian called Spencer
Bay Mountain, on the east, and already we saw Mount Kineo
before us in the north.

Paddling near the shore, we frequently heard the pc-pe of
the olive-sided flycatcher, also the wood-pewee, and the king-
fisher, thus early in the morning. The Indian reminding us
that he could not work without eating, we stopped to break-
fast on the main shore, southwest of Deer Island, at a spot
where the Mimulus ringens grew abundantly. We took out
our bags, and the Indian made a fire under a very large
bleached log, using white-pine bark from a stump, though he
said that hemlock was better, and kindling with canoe-birch
bark. Our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch-bark,
laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard bread,

SIO THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
fried pork, and strong coffee, well sweetened, in which we did
not miss the milk.

While we were getting breakfast a brood of twelve black
dippers, half grown, came paddling by within three or four
rods, not at all alarmed; and they loitered about as long as
we stayed, now huddled close together, within a circle of
eighteen inches in diameter, now moving off in a long line,
very cunningly. Yet they bore a certain proportion to the
great Moosehead Lake on whose bosom they floated, and I
felt as if they were under its protection.

Looking northward from this place it appeared as if we
were entering a large bay, and we did not know whether we
should be obliged to diverge from our course and keep outside
a point which we saw, or should find a passage between this
and the mainland. I consulted my map and used my glass,
and the Indian did the same, but we could not find our place
exactly on the map, nor could we detect any break in the
shore. When I asked the Indian the way, he answered “I don^t
know,’’ which I thought remarkable, since he had said that
he was familiar with the lake; but it appeared that he had
never been up this side. It was misty dog-day weather, and we
had already penetrated a smaller bay of the same kind, and
knocked the bottom out of it, though we had been obliged to
pass over a small bar, between an island and the shore, where
there was but just breadth and depth enough to float the
canoe, and the Indian had observed, “Very easy makum
bridge here,” but now it seemed that, if we held on, we should
be fairly embayed. Presently, however, though we had not
stirred, the mist lifted somewhat, and revealed a break in
the shore northward, showing that the point was a portion
of Deer Island, and that our course lay westward of it. Where
it had seemed a continuous shore even through a glass, one
portion was now seen by the naked eye to be much more
distant than the other which overlapped it, merely by the
greater thickness of the mist which still rested on it, while
the nearer or island portion was comparatively bare and

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH SU
green. The line of separation was very distinct, and the
Indian immediately remarked, ‘T guess you and I go there,
— I guess there’s room for my canoe there.” This was his
common expression instead of saying we. He never addressed
us by our names, though curious to know how they were
spelled and what they meant, while we called him Polis.
He had already guessed very accurately at our ages, and said
that he was forty-eight.

After breakfast I emptied the melted pork that was left
into the lake, making what sailors cal) a ^‘slick,’* and watching
to see how much it spread over and smoothed the agitated
surface. The Indian looked at it a moment and said, “That
make hard paddlum thro’ ; hold ’em canoe. So say old times.”

We hastily reloaded, putting the dishes loose in the bows,
that they might be at hand when wanted, and set out again.
The western shore, near which we paddled along, rose gently
to a considerable height, and was everywhere densely covered
with the forest, in which was a large proportion of hard wood
to enliven and relieve the fir and spruce.

The Indian said that the usnea lichen which we saw hang-
ing from the trees was called chorchorque. We asked him the
names of several small birds which we heard this morning. The
wood-thrush, which was quite common, and whose note he
imitated, he said was called Adelungquamooktum\ but some-
times he could not tell the name of some small bird which I
heard and knew, but he said, “I tell all the birds about here, —
this country; can’t tell littlum noise, but I see ’em, then I can
tell.’^

I observed that I should like to go to school to him to learn
his language, living on the Indian island the while; could not
that be done? “Oh, yer,” he replied, “good many do so.” I
asked how long he thought it would take. He said one week.
I told him that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew, and
he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed.

The birds sang quite as in our woods, — the red-eye, red-
start, veery, wood-pewee, etc., but we saw no bluebirds in

512 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
all our journey, and several told me in Bangor that they had
not the bluebird there. Mount Kineo, which was generally
visible, though occasionally concealed by islands or the main-
land in front, had a level bar of cloud concealing its summit,
and all the mountain-tops about the lake were cut off at the
same height. Ducks of various kinds, — sheldrake, summer
ducks, etc., — ^were quite common, and ran over the water
before us as fast as a horse trots. Thus they were soon out of
sight.

Again we crossed a broad bay opposite the mouth of Moose
River, before reaching the narrow strait at Mount Kineo,
made what the voyageurs call a traverse, and found the water
ouite rough. A very little wind on these broad lakes raises a
sea which will swamp a canoe. Looking off from the shore, the
surface may appear to be very little agitated, almost smooth,
a mile distant, or if you see a few white crests they appear
nearly level with the rest of the lake; but when you get out
so far, you may find quite a sea running, and erelong, before
you think of it, a wave will gently creep up the side of the
canoe and fill your lap, like a monster deliberately covering
you with its slime before it swallows you, or it will strike the
canoe violently, and break into it. The same thing may happen
when the wind rises suddenly, though it were perfectly calm
and smooth there a few minutes before ; so that nothing can
save you, unless you can swim ashore, for it is impossible to
get into a canoe again when it is upset. Since you sit flat on
the bottom, though the danger should not be imminent, a
little water is a great inconvenience, not to mention the
wetting of your provisions. We rarely crossed even a bay di-
rectly, from point to point, when there was wind, but made a
slight curve corresponding somewhat to the shore, that we
might the sooner reach it if the wind increased.

When the wind is aft, and not too strong, the Indian makes

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 513
a sprit-sail of his blanket. He thus easily skims over the whole
length of this lake in a day.

The Indian paddled on one side, and one of us on the other^
to keep the canoe steady, and when he wanted to change
hands he would say ^‘t’ other side.’^ He asserted, in answer to
our questions, that he had never upset a canoe himself, though
he may have been upset by others.

Think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that
great lake, a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it.

My companion trailed for trout as we paddled along, but
the Indian warning him that a big fish might upset us, for
there are some very large ones there, he agreed to pass the
line quickly to him in the stern if he had a bite. Beside trout,
I heard of cusk, white-fish, etc., as found in this lake.

While we were crossing this bay, where Mount Kineo rose
dark before us, within two or three miles, the Indian repeated
the tradition respecting this mountain's having anciently been
a cow moose, — how a mighty Indian hunter, whose name I
forget, succeeded in killing this queen of the moose tribe with
great difficulty, while her calf was killed somewhere among
the islands in Penobscot Bay, and, to his eyes, this mountain
had still the form of the moose in a reclining posture, its
precipitous side presenting the outline of her head. He told
this at some length, though it did not amount to much, and
with apparent good faith, and asked us how we supposed the
hunter could have killed such a mighty moose as that, — how
we could do it. Whereupon a man-of-war to fire broadsides
into her was suggested, etc. An Indian tells such a story as if
he thought it deserved to have a good deal said about it, only
he has not got it to say, and so he makes up for the deficiency
by a drawling tone, long-windedness, and a dumb wonder
which he hopes will be contagious.

We approached the land again through pretty rough water,
and then steered directly across the lake, at its narrowest part,
to the eastern side, and were soon partly under the lee of the

514 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
mountain, about a mile north of the Kineo House, having pad-
died about twenty miles. It was now about noon.

We designed to stop there that afternoon and night, and
spent half an hour looking along the shore northward for a
suitable place to camp. We took out all our baggage at one
place in vain, it being too rocky and uneven, and while
engaged in this search we made our first acquaintance with
the moose-fly. At length, half a mile farther north, by going
half a dozen rods into the dense spruce and fir wood on the
side of the mountain, almost as dark as a cellar, we found
a place sufficiently clear and level to lie down on, after cutting
away a few bushes. We required a space only seven feet by six
for our bed, the fire being four or five feet in front, though
it made no odds how rough the hearth was; but it was not al-
ways easy to find this in those woods. The Indian first cleared
a path to it from the shore with his axe, and we then carried up
all our baggage, pitched our tent, and made our bed, in order
to be ready for foul weather, which then threatened us, and
for the night. He gathered a large armful of fir twigs, break-
ing them off, which ne said were the best for our bed, partly,
I thought, because they were the largest and could be most
rapidly collected. It had been raining more or less for four
or five days, and the wood was even damper than usual, but
he got dry bark for the fire from the under side of a dead lean-
ing hemlock, which, he said, he could always do.

This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and
I referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. It ap-
peared that he had been buying land lately (I think it was a
hundred acres), but there was probably an incumbrance to
it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for
this year. He wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and
was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the
grass before he. Polls, bought the land, the former could take
it, whether the latter knew it or not. To which he only an-
swered, Strange I ” He went over this several times, fairly sat
down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH SIS
to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway, only
reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men's
institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die.

He said that he had fifty acres of grass, potatoes, etc., some-
where above Oldtown, beside some about his house; that he
hired a good deal of his work, hoeing, etc., and preferred
white men to Indians, because “they keep steady, and know
how.”

After dinner we returned southward along the shore, in the
canoe, on account of the difficulty of climbing over the rocks
and fallen trees, and began to ascend the mountain along the
edge of the precipice. But a smart shower coming up just then,
the Indian crept under his canoe, while we, being protected by
our rubber coats, proceeded to botanize. So we sent him back
to the camp for shelter, agreeing that he should come there for
us with his canoe toward night. It had rained a little in the
forenoon, and we trusted that this would be the clearing-up
shower, which it proved ; but our feet and legs were thoroughly
wet by the bushes. The clouds breaking away a little, we had
a glorious wild view, as we ascended, of the broad lake with its
fluctuating surface and numerous forest-clad islands, extend-
ing beyond our sight both north and south, and the boundless
forest undulating away from its shores on every side, as
densely packed as a rye-field, and enveloping nameless moun-
tains in succession; but above all, looking westward over a
large island was visible a very distant part of the lake, though
we did not then suspect it to be Moosehead, — at first a mere
broken white line seen through the tops of the island trees,
like hay-caps, but spreading to a lake when we got higher.
Beyond this we saw what appears to be called Bald Mountain
on the map, some twenty-five miles distant, near the sources
of the Penobscot. It was a perfect lake of the woods. But this
was only a transient gleam, for the rain was not quite over.

Looking southward, the heavens were completely overcast,
the mountains capped with clouds, and the lake generally
wore a dark and stormy appearance, but from its surface just

516 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
north of Sugar Island, six or eight miles distant, there was
reflected upward to us through the misty air a bright blue
tinge from the distant unseen sky of another latitude beyond.
They probably had a clear sky then at Greenville, the south
end of the lake. Standing on a motmtain in the midst of a
lake, where would you look for the first sign of approaching
fair weather? Not into the heavens, it seems, but into the
lake.

Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the
^‘drisk,’’ with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the
steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its
position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do
the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might
mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he
heard its puffing or its whistle.

If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the
most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so
as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most
suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There
is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a
tearful eye.

When we got to the camp, the canoe was taken out and
turned over, and a log laid across it to prevent its being blown
away. The Indian cut some large logs of damp and rotten
hard wood to smoulder and keep fire through the night. The
trout was fried for supper. Our tent was of thin cotton cloth
and quite small, forming with the ground a triangular prism
closed at the rear end, six feet long, seven wide, and four high,
so that we could barely sit up in the middle. It required two
forked stakes, a smooth ridge-pole, and a dozen or more pins
to pitch it. It kept off dew and wind, and an ordinary rain,
and answered our purpose well enough. We reclined within it
till bedtime, each with his baggage at his head, or else sat

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 517
about the fire, having hung our wet clothes on a pole before
the fire for the night.

As we sat there, just before night, looking out through the
dusky wood, the Indian heard a noise which he said was made
by a snake. He imitated it at my request, making a low whis-
tling note, — pheet — pheet , — two or three times repeated^
somewhat like the peep of the hylodes, but not so loud. In
answer to my inquiries, he said that he had never seen them
while making it, but going to the spot he finds the snake.
This, he said on another occasion, was a sign of rain. When
I had selected this place for our camp, he had remarked that
there were snakes there, — he saw them. But they won’t do any
hurt, I said. “Oh, no,” he answered, “just as you say, it makes
no difference to me.”

He lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he said, he
was partly deaf in one ear, and he wanted to lie with his good
ear up. As we lay there, he inquired if I ever heard “Indian
sing.” I replied that I had not often, and asked him if he
would not favor us with a song. He readily assented, and lying
on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he com-
menced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his
own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago
by the Catholic missionaries. He translated it to us, sentence
by sentence, afterward, wishing to see if we could remember
it. It proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn,
the burden of which was, that there was only one God who
ruled all the world. This was hammered (or sung) out very
thin, so that some stanzas wellnigh meant nothing at all,
merely keeping up the idea. He then said that he would sing
us a Latin song ; but we did not detect any Latin, only one or
two Greek words in it, — ^the rest may have been Latin with
the Indian pronunciation.

His singing carried me back to the period of the discovery
of America, to San Salvador and the Incas, when Europeans
first encountered the simple faith of the Indian. There was, in-
deed, a beautiful sinQ)licity about it; nothing of the dark and

518 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
savage, only the mild and infantile. The sentiments of humil-
ity and reverence chiefly were expressed.

It was a dense and damp spruce and fir wood in which we
lay, and, except for our fire, perfectly dark; and when I
awoke in the night, I either heard an owl from deeper in the
forest behind us, or a loon from a distance over the lake.
Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered
brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I
observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a per-
fectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its
shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one
eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as
the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white
and slumbering light, like the glowworm’s. I could tell it
from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must
be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but
never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little
hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood
{Acer striatum) which the Indian had cut off in a slanting
direction the evening before. Using my knife, I discovered
that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood
immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular
ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the
level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into
the sap, it was all aglow along the log. I was surprised to find
the wood quite hard and apparently sound, though probably
decay had commenced in the sap, and I cut out some little
triangular chips, and, placing them in the hollow of my hand,
carried them into the camp, waked my companion, and
showed them to him. They lit up the inside of my hand, re-
vealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like
coals of fire raised to a white heat, and I saw at once how,
probably, the Indian jugglers had imposed on their people and
on travelers, pretending to hold coals of fire in their mouths.

I also noticed that part of a decayed stump within four or

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 519
five feet of the fire, an inch wide and six inches long, soft and
shaking wood, shone with equal brightness.

I neglected to ascertain whether our fire had anything to
do with this, but the previous day’s rain and long-continued
wet weather undoubtedly had.

I was exceedingly interested by this phenomenon, and al-
ready felt paid for my journey. It could hardly have thrilled
me more if it had taken the form of letters, or of the human
face. If I had met with this ring of light while groping in
this forest alone, away from any fire, I should ha\e been still
more surprised. I little thought that there was such a light
shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me.

The next day the Indian told me their name for this light,
— Artoosoqu \ — and on my inquiring concerning the will-o’-
the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his ‘‘folks”
sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even
as high as the trees, and making a noise. I was prepared after
this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena,
witnessed by “his folks;” they are abroad at all hours and
seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. Nature must
have made a thousand revelations to them which are still
secrets to us.

I did not regret my not having seen this before, since I
now saw it under circumstances so favorable. I was in just
the frame of mind to see something wonderful, and this was
a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation,
and it put me on the alert to see more like it. I exulted like “a
pagan suckled in a creed” that had never been worn at all,
but was bran new, and adequate to the occasion. I let science
slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow-
creature. I saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to
know that it was so cheap. A scientific explanation, as it is
called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is
for pale daylight. Science with its retorts would have put mo
to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I im
proved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen

520 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before.
I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-
full of honest spirits as good as myself any day, — not an
empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone,
but an inhabited house, — and for a few moments I enjoyed
fellowship with them. Your so-called wise man goes trying
to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself
and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth.
It suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth
to the same sort of belief or religion. One revelation has been
made to the Indian, another to the white man. I have much
to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary. I am not
sure but all that would tempt me to teach the Indian my
religion would be his promise to teach me his. Long enough
I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to
make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood.
Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates com-
pletely, for it has no depth.

I kept those little chips and wet them again the next night,
but they emitted no light.

Saturday, July 25.

At breakfast this Saturday morning, the Indian, evidently
curious to know what would be expected of him the next day,
whether we should go along or not, asked me how I spent the
Sunday when at home. I told him that I commonly sat in my
chamber reading, etc., in the forenoon, and went to walk in
the afternoon. At which he shook his head and said, “Er,
that is ver bad.” ^^How do you spend it?” I asked. He said
that he did no work, that he went to church at Oldtown when
he was at home; in short, he did as he had been taught by the
whites. This led to a discussion in which I found myself in
the minority. He stated that he was a Protestant, and asked
me if I was. I did not at first know what to say, but I thought
that I could answer with truth that I was.

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 521

When we were washing the dishes in the lake, many fishes,
apparently chivin, came close up to us to get the particles of
grease.

The weather seemed to be more settled this morning, and
we set out early in order to finish our voyage up the lake be-
fore the wind arose. Soon after starting, the Indian directed
our attention to the northeast carry, which we could plainly
see, about thirteen miles distant in that direction as measured
on the map, though it is called much farther. This carry is a
rude wooden railroad, running north and sou.h about two
miles, perfectly straight, from the lake to the Penobscot,
through a low tract, with a clearing three or four rods wide;
but low as it is, it passes over the height of land there. This
opening appeared as a clear bright, or light point in the hori-
zon, resting on the edge of the lake, whose breadth a hair
could have covered at a considerable distance from the eye,
and of no appreciable height. We should not have suspected
it to be visible if Ihe Indian had not drawn our attention to it.
It was a remarkable kind of light to steer for, — daylight seen
through a vista in the forest, — but visible as far as an ordinary
beadon at night.

We crossed a deep and wide bay which makes eastward
north of Kineo, leaving an island on our left, and keeping up
the eastern side of the lake. This way or that led to some
Tomhegan or Socatarian stream, up which the Indian had
hunted, and whither I longed to go. The last name, however,
had a bogus sound, too much like sectarian for me, as if a
missionary had tampered with it; but I knew that the Indians
were very liberal. I think I should have inclined to the Tom-
hegan first.

W^e then crossed another broad bay, which, as we could no
longer observe the shore particularly, afforded ample time
for conversation. The Indian said that he had got his money
by hunting, mostly high up the west branch of the Penobscot,
and toward the head of the St. John; he had hunted there
from a boy, and knew all about that region. His game had

522 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
been, beaver, otier, black cat (or fisher), sable, moose, etc.
Loup cervier (or Canada lynx) were plenty yet in burnt
grounds. For food in the woods, he uses partridges, ducks,
dried moose meat, hedge-hog, etc. Loons, too, were good,
only “bile ’em good.” He told us at some length how he had
suffered from starvation when a mere lad, being overtaken
by winter when hunting with two grown Indians in the
northern part of Maine, and obliged to leave their canoe on
account of ice.

Pointing into the bay, he said that it was the way to va-
rious lakes which he knew. Only solemn bear-haunted moun-
tains, with their great wooded slopes, were visible; where, as
man is not, we suppose some other power to be. My imagina-
tion personified the slopes themselves, as if by their very
length they would waylay you, and compel you to camp
again on them before night. Some invisible glutton would
seem to drop from the trees and gnaw at the heart of the
solitary hunter who threaded those woods; and yet I was
tempted to walk there. The Indian said that he had been along
there several times.

I asked him how he guided himself in the woods. “Oh,”
said he, “I can tell good many ways.” When I pressed him
further, he answered, “Sometimes I lookum side-hill,” and
he glanced toward a high hill or mountain on the eastern
shore, “great difference between the north and south, see
where the sun has shone most. So trees, — the large limbs bend
toward south. Sometimes I lookum locks” (rocks). I asked
what he saw on the rocks, but he did not describe anything in
particular, answering vaguely, in a mysterious or drawling
tone, “Bare locks on lake shore, — great difference between
iV. S. E. W. side, — can tell what the sun has shone on.” “Sup-
pose,” said I, “that I should take you in a dark night, right
up here into the middle of the woods a hundred miles, set
you down, and turn you round quickly twenty times, could you
steer straight to Oldtown?” “Oh, yer,” said he, “have done
pretty much same thing. I will tell you. Some years ago I

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 523
met an old white hunter at Millinocket; very good hunter.
He said he could go anywhere in the woods. He wanted to
hunt with me that day, so we start. We chase a moose all the
forenoon, round and round, till middle of afternoon, when
we kill him. Then I said to him, now you go straight to camp.
Don’t go round and round where we’ve been, but go straight.
He said, I can’t do that, I don’t know where I am. Where
you think camp? I asked. He pointed so. Then I laugh at
him. I take the lead and go right off the other way, cross our
tracks many times, straight camp.” ^‘How do you do that?”
asked I. ^‘Oh, I can’t tell yoUj^ he replied. “Great difference
between me and white man.”

It appeared as if the sources of information were so various
that he did not give a distinct, conscious attention to any one,
and so could not readily refer to any when questioned about
it, but he found his way very much as an animal does. Per-
haps what is commonly called instinct in the animal, in this
case is merely a sharpened and educated sense. Often, when
an Indian says, “I don’t know,” in regard to the route he
is to take, he does not mean what a white man would by
those words, for his Indian instinct msiy tell him still as much
as the most confident white man knows. He does not carry
things in his head, nor remember the route exactly, like a
white man, but relies on himself at the moment. Not having
experienced the need of the other sort of knowledge, all
labeled and arranged, he has not acquired it.

The white hunter with whom I talked in the stage knew
some of the resources of the Indian. He said that he steered
by the wind, or by the limbs of the hemlocks, which were
largest on the south side ; also sometimes, when he knew that
there was a lake near, by firing his gun and listening to hear
the direction and distance of the echo from over it.

The course we took over this lake, and others afterward,
was rarely direct, but a succession of curves from point to
point, digressing considerably into each of the bays; and this
was not merely on account of the wind, for the Indian, look-

524 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ing toward the middle of the lake, said it was hard to go there,
easier to keep near the shore, because he thus got over it by
successive reaches and saw by the shore how he got along.

The following will suffice for a common experience in
crossing lakes in a canoe. As the forenoon advanced, the wind
increased. The last bay which we crossed before reaching the
desolate pier at the northeast carry was two or three miles
over, and the wind was southwesterly. After going a third of
the way, the waves had increased so as occasionally to wash
into the canoe, and we saw that it was worse and worse ahead.
At first we might have turned about, but were not willing to.
It would have been of no use to follow the course of the shore,
for not only the distance would have been much greater, but
the waves ran still higher there on account of the greater
sweep the wind had. At any rate it would have been dangerous
now to alter our course, because the waves would have struck
us at an advantage. It will not do to meet them at right angles,
for then they will wash in both sides, but you must take them
quartering. So the Indian stood up in the canoe, and exerted
all his skill and strength for a mile or two, while I paddled
right along in order to give him more steerage-way. For more
than a mile he did not allow a single w^ave to strike the canoe
as it would, but turned it quickly from this side to that, so
that it would always be on or near the crest of a wave when
it broke, where all its force was spent, and we merely settled
down with it. At length I jumped out on to the end of the
pier, against which the waves were dashing violently, in order
to lighten the canoe, and catch it at the landing, which was
not much sheltered; but just as I jumped we took in two or
three gallons of water. I remarked to the Indian, “You man-
aged that well,” to which he replied, “Ver few men do that.
Great many waves; when I look out for one, another come
quick.”

While the Indian went to get cedar-bark, etc., to carry his
canoe with, we cooked the dinner on the shore, at this end of
the carry, in the midst of a sprinkling rain.

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH S2S

He prepared his canoe for carrying in this wise. He took a
cedar shingle or splint eighteen inches long and four or five
wide, rounded at one end, that the corners might not be in
the way, and tied it with cedar-bark by two holes made mid-
way, near the edge on each side, to the middle cross-bar of
the canoe. When the canoe was lifted upon his head bottom
up, this shingle, with its rounded end uppermost, distributed
the weight over his shoulders and head, while a band of cedar-
bark, tied to the cross-bar on each side of the shingle, passed
round his breast, and another longer one, outside of the last,
round his forehead; also a hand on each side-rail served to
steer the canoe and keep it from rocking. He thus carried
it with his shoulders, head, breast, forehead, and both hands,
as if the upper part of his body were all one hand to clasp
and hold it. If you know of a better way, I should like to hear
of it. A cedar-tree furnished all the gear in this case, as it
had the woodwork of the canoe. One of the paddles rested on
the cross-bars in the bows. I took the canoe upon my head
and found that I could carry it with ease, though the straps
were not fitted to my shoulders; but I let him carry it, not
caring to establish a different precedent, though he said that
if I would carry the canoe, he would take all the rest of the
baggage, except my companion’s. This shingle remained tied
to the cross-bar throughout the voyage, was always ready for
the carries, and also served to protect the back of one passen-
ger.

We were obliged to go over this carry twice, our load was
so great. But the carries were an agreeable variety, and we
improved the opportunity to gather the rare plants which
we had seen, when we returned empty handed.

We reached the Penobscot about four o’clock, and found
there some St. Francis Indians encamped on the bank, in the
same place where I camped with four Indians four years
before. They were making a canoe, and, as then, drying moose
meat. The meat looked very suitable to make a black broth
at least. Our Indian said it was not good. Their camp was

526 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
covered with spruce-bark. They had got a young moose,
taken in the river a fortnight before, confined in a sort of cage
of logs piled up cob-fashion, seven or eight feet high. It was
quite tame, about four feet high, and covered with moose-
flies. There was a large quantity of cornel (C. stolonifera)^
red maple, and also willow and aspen boughs, stuck through
between the logs on all sides, butt-ends out, and on their
leaves it was browsing. It looked at first as if it were in a
bower rather than a pen.

Our Indian said that he used black spruce roots to sew
canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. The
St. Francis Indian thought that white spruce roots might be
best. But the former said, ‘‘No good, break, can’t split ’em;”
also that they were hard to get, deep in ground, but the black
were near the surface, on higher land, as well as tougher. He
said that the white spruce was subekoondark, black, skusk. I
told him I thought that I could make a canoe, but he ex-
pressed great doubt of it; at any rate, he thought that my
work would not be “neat” the first time. An Indian at Green-
ville had told me that the winter bark, that is, bark taken off
before the sap flows in May, was harder and much better than
summer bark.

Having reloaded, we paddled down the Penobscot, which,
as the Indian remarked, and even I detected, remembering
how it looked before, was uncommonly full. We soon after
saw a splendid yellow lily {Lilium Canadensc) by the shore,
which I plucked. It was six feet high, and had twelve flowers,
in two whorls, forming a pyramid, such as I have seen in
Concord, We afterward saw many more thus tall along this
itream, and also st'1 more numerous on the East Branch, and,
on the latter, one which I thought approached yet nearer to
the Lilium superbum. The Indian asked what we called it, and
said that the “loots” (roots) were good for soup, that is, to
cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flour. They
get them in the fall. I dug some, and found a mass of bulbs

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 527
pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and
even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the ear.

When we had gone about three miles down the Penobscot,
we saw through the tree-tops a thunder-shower coming up in
the west, and we looked out a camping-place in good season,
about five o’clock, on the west side, not far below the mouth
of what Joe Aitteon, in ’53, called Lobster Stream, coming
from Lobster Pond. Our present Indian, however, did not
admit this name, nor even that of Matahumkeag, which is on
the map, but called the lake Beskahekuk,

I will describe, once for all, the routine of camping at this
season. We generally told the Indian that we would stop at
the first suitable place, so that he might be on the lookout for
it. Having observed a clear, hard, and flat beach to land on,
free from mud, and from stones which would injure the
canoe, one would run up the bank to see if there were open
and level space enough for the camp between the trees, or if
it could be easily cleared, preferring at the same time a cool
place, on account of insects. Sometimes we paddled a mile or
more before finding one to our minds, for where the shore was
suitable, the bank would often be too steep, or else too low
and grassy, and therefore mosquitoey. We then took out the
baggage and drew up the canoe, sometimes turning it over on
shore for safety. The Indian cut a path to the spot we had
selected, which was usually within two or three rods of the
water, and we carried up our baggage. One, perhaps, takes
canoe-birch bark, always at hand, and dead dry wood or bark,
and kindles a fire five or six feet in front of where we intend
to lie. It matters not, commonly, on which side this is, because
there is little or no wind in so dense a wood at that season ; and
then he gets a kettle of water from the river, ^nd takes out the
pork, bread, coffee, etc., from their several packages.

Another, meanwhile, having the axe, cuts down the nearest
dead rock-maple or other dry hard wood, collecting several
large logs to last through the night, also a green stake, with a
notch or fork to it, which is slanted over the fire, perhaps

S 28 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
resting on a rock or forked stake, to hang the kettle on, and
two forked stakes and a pole for the tent.

The third man pitches the tent, cuts a dozen or more pins
with his knife, usually of moosewood, the common under-
wood, to fasten it down with, and then collects an armful or
two of fir-twigs ^ arbor-vitae, spruce, or hemlock, whichever
is at hand, and makes the bed, beginning at either end, and
laying the twigs wrong side up, in regular rows, covering the
stub ends of the last row; first, however, filling the hollows, if
there are any, with coarser material. Wrangel says that his
guides in wSiberia first strewed a quantity of dry brushwood on
the ground, and then cedar twigs on that.

Commonly, by the time the bed is made, or within fifteen
or twenty minutes, the water boils, the pork is fried, and
supper is ready. We eat this sitting on the ground, or a stumjj,
if there is any, around a large piece of birch-bark for a table,
each holding a dipper in one hand and a piece of ship-bread
or fried pork in the other, frequently making a pass with his
hand, or thrusting his head into the smoke, to avoid the
mosquitoes.

Next, pipes are lit by those who smoke, and veils are
donned by those who have them, and we hastily examine and
dry our plants, anoint our faces and hands, and go to bed, —
and — the mosquitoes.

Though you have nothing to do but see the country, there’s
rarely any time to spare, hardly enough to examine a plant,
before the night or drowsiness is upon you.

Such w^as the ordinary experience, but this evening we had
camped earlier on account of the rain, and had more time.

Sunday, July 26 ,

The note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting
but almost wiry sound, was the first heard in the morning,

These twigs are called in Rasle’s Dictionary, Sediak,

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 529
and with this all the woods rang. This was the prevailing bird
in the northern part of Maine. The forest generally was all
alive with them at this season, and they were proportionally
numerous and musical about Bangor. They evidently breed
in that State. Though commonly unseen, their simple ahy te^
te-te, te-te-te, te-te-tCy so sharp and piercing, was as distinct
to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkest
of the forest would be to the eye. I thought that they com-
monly uttered it as they flew. I hear this note for a few days
only in the spring, as they go through Concord, and in the
fall see them again going southward, but then they are mute.
We were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early.
What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far
from mankind and election day!

I told the Indian that we would go to church to Chesuncook
this (Sunday) morning, some fifteen miles. It was settled
weather at last.. A few swallows flitted over the water, we
heard the white throats along the shore, the phebe notes of
the chickadee, and, I believe, redstarts, and moose-flies of
large size pursued us in mid-stream.

The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday.
Said he, come here lookum things, look all round; but
come Sunday, lock up all that, and then Monday look again.’’
He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with
some ministers to Ktaadn, and had told him how they con-
ducted. This he described in a low and solemn voice. ‘^They
make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every
meal. Come Sunday,” said he, “they stop ’em, no go at all that
day, — keep still, — ^preach all day, — first one, then another,
just like church. Oh, ver good men.” “One day,” said he,
“going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the
water, drowned good while, all ready fall to pieces. They go
right ashore, — ^stop there, go no farther that day, — ^they
have meeting there, preach and pray just lik& Sunday. Then
they get poles and lift ”p the body, and they go back and
carry the body with them. Oh, they ver good men.”

530 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

I judged from this account that their every camp was a
camp-meeting, and they had mistaken their route,— they
should have gone to Eastham; that they wanted an oppor-
tunity to preach somewhere more than to see Ktaadn. I read
of another similar party that seem to have spent their time
there singing the songs of Zion. I was glad that I did not go
to that mountain with such slow coaches.

However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the
while, that if we would go along, he must go with us, he our
man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do
Sunday, then there’s no harm, but if he takum pay, then
wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men. Never-
theless, I noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the Sun-
days at last.

He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers
m a loud voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning
and evening, — sometimes scrambling up again in haste when
he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity.
In the course of the day, he remarked, not very originally,
“Poor man rememberum God more than rich.”

"We soon passed the island where I had camped four years
before, and I recognized the very spot. The dead water, a mile
or two below it, the Indian called Beska bekukskishtuk, from
the lake Beskabekuk, which empties in above. This dead
water, he said, was “a great place for moose always.” We saw
the grass bent where a moose came out the night before, and
the Indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see
him; but, he added, that if he should see five or six to-day
close by canoe, he no shoot ’em. Accordingly, as he was the
only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting,
the moose were safe.

Just below this, a cat-owl flew heavily over the stream, and
he, asking if I knew what it was, imitated very well the com-
mon hoo, hoo, hoo, hoorer, hoo, of our woods ; making a hard,
guttural sound, “Ugn, ugh, ugh, — ugh, ugh.” When we passed
the Moose-horn, he said that it had no name. What Joe

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 531
Aitteon had called Ragmuff, he called Pay tay te quick, and
said that it meant Burnt Ground Stream. We stopped there,
where I had stopped before, and I bathed in this tributary. It
was shallow but cold, apparently too cold for the Indian, who
stood looking on. As we were pushing away again, a white-
headed eagle sailed over our heads. A reach some miles above
Pine Stream, where there were several islands, the Indian said
was Nonglangyis Dead-water. Pine Stream he called Black
River, and said that its Indian name was Karsaootuk, He
could go to Caribou Lake that way.

We carried a part of the baggage about Pine-Stream Falls,
while the Indian went down in the canoe. A Bangor merchant
had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some
time ago while passing these falls in a batteau, and a third
clung to a rock all night, and was taken off in the morning.
There were magnificent great purple fringed-orchises on this
carry and the neighboring shores. I measured the largest
canoe-birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the
carry. It was 14J4 feet in circumference at two feet from the
ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. The canoe-
birches thereabouts were commonly marked by conspicuous
dark spiral ridges, with a groove between, so that I thought
at first that they had been struck by lightning, but, as the
Indian said, it was evidently caused by the grain of the tree.
He cut a small, woody knob, as big as a filbert, from the
trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with
wood, which he said was good medicine.

After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my com-
panion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled
back to get it, against the strong and swift current. This
taught us the difference between going up and down the
stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter
of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and a half at
least. So we landed, and while he and the Indian were gone
back for it, I watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white
water-fowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. It alter-

532 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
nately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being car-
ried round by an eddy. Even this semblance of life was inter-
esting on that lonely river.

Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook dead-
water, caused by the flowing back of the lake. As we paddled
slowly over this, the Indian told us a story of his hunting
thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself.
It appeared that he had reoresented his tribe at Augusta, and
also once at Washington, where he had met some Western
chiefs. He had been consulted at Augusta, and gave advice,
which he said was followed, respecting the eastern boundary
of Maine, as determined by highlands and streams, at the
time of the difficulties on that side. He was employed with the
surveyors on the line. Also he had called on Daniel Webster
in Boston, at the time of his Bunker Hill oration.

I was surprised to hear him say that he liked to go to
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc., etc.; that he would
like to live there. But then, as if relenting a little, when he
thought what a poor figure he would make there, he added, “I
suppose, I live in New York, I be poorest hunter, I expect.”
He understood very well both his superiority and his infe-
riority to the whites. He criticised the people of the United
States as compared with other nations, but the only distinct
idea with which he labored was, that they were ^^very strong,”
but, like some individuals, ^‘too fast.” He must have the credit
of saying this just before the general breaking down of rail-
roads and banks. He had a great idea of education, and would
occasionally break out into such expressions as this, ^‘Kademy
— a-cad-e-my — good thing — I suppose they usum Fifth
Reader there. . . . You been college?”

From this dead water the outlines of the mountains about
Ktaadn were visible. The top of Ktaadn was concealed by a
cloud, but the Souneunk Mountains were nearer, and quite
visible. We steered across the northwest end of the lake, from
which we looked down south-southeast, the whole length to
Joe Merry Mountain, seen over its extremity. It is an agree-

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 533
able change to cross a lake, after you have been shut up in the
woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water,
but also of sky. It is one of the surprises which Nature has in
store for the traveler in the forest. To look down, in this case,
over eighteen miles of water, was liberating and civilizing
even. No doubt, the short distance to which you can see in
the woods, and the general twilight, would at length react on
the inhabitants, and make them salvages. The lakes also reveal
the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought.
The very gulls which we saw sitting on the rocks, like white
specks, or circling about, reminded me of custom-house of-
ficers. Already there were half a dozen log-huts about this end
of the lake, though so far from a road. I perceive that in these
woods the earliest settlements are, for various reasons, cluster-
ing about the lakes, but partly, I think, for the sake of the
neighborhood as the oldest clearings. They are forest schools
already established, — great centres of light. Water is a pi-
oneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its im-
provements.

Thus far only I had been before. About noon we turned
northward, up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast
corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about
a mile from the lake, reached the Umbazookskus, which
comes in on the right at a point where the former river, com-
ing fro:u the west, turns short to the south. Our course was up
the Umbazookslius, but as the Indian knew of a good camping-
place, that is, a coo! place where there were few mosquitoes,
about half a mile farther up the Caucomgomoc, we went
thither. The latter river, judging from the map, is the longer
and principal stream, and, therefore, its name must prevail
below the junction. So quickly ^'hanged the civilizing sky
of Chesuncook for the dark wood of the Caucomgomoc. On
reaching the Indian’s camping-ground, on the south side,
where the bank was about a dozen feet high, I read on the
trunk of a fir-tree, blazed by an axe, an inscription in char-
coal which had been left by him. It was surmounted by a

534 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the
sign which had been used by his family always. The drawing,
though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear,
and he doubted my ability to copy it. The inscription ran
thus, verbatim et literatim. I interline the English of his
Indian as he gave it to me.

[The figure of a bear in a boat.]

July 26
1853

Niasoseb
We alone Joseph
Polls clioi

Polls start

sia olta

for Oldtown

ouke ni

right away

quambi

July 15
1855

Niasoseb

He added now below: —

1857
July 26
Jo. Polls

Monday, July 27.

Having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the Indian always
carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each
having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left,

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 535
we set out again, descending the Caucomgomoc, and turning
northeasterly up the Umbazookskus. This name, the Indian
said, meant Much Meadow River, We found it a very mead-
owy stream, and dead water, and now very wide on account
of the rains, though, he said, it was sometimes quite narrow.
The space between the woods, chiefly bare meadow, was from
fifty to two hundred rods in breadth, and is a rare place for
moose. It reminded me of the Concord ; and what increased
the resemblance was one old musquash house almost afloat.

In the water on the meadows grew sedges, wool-grass, the
common blue-flag abundantly, its flower just showing itself
above the high water, as if it were a blue water-lily, and
higher in the meadows a great many clumps of a peculiar
narrow-leaved willow (Salix petiolaris)^ which is common in
our river meadows. It was the prevailing one here, and the
Indian said that the musquash ate much of it; and here also
grew the red osier {Cornus stolonifera) ^ its large fruit now
whitish.

Though it was still early in the morning, we saw night-
hawks circling over the meadow, and as usual heard the Pepe
{Muscicapa Cooperi), which is one of the prevailing birds in
these woods, and the robin.

It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the
shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when I was
shouting in order to awake it, the Indian reminded me that
I should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and
which we all wanted to see. The word for echo was
Pockadunkquaywayle,

A broad belt of dead larch-trees along the distant edge of
the meadow, against the forest on each side, increased the
usual wildness of the scenery. The Indian called these juniper,
and said that they had been killed by the back-water caused
by the dam at the outlet of Chesuncook Lake, some twenty
miles distant. I plucked at the water’s edge the Asclepias in-
carnata, with quite handsome flowers, a brighter red than

S36 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
our variety (the pulchra) . It was the only form of it which I
saw there.

Having paddled several miles up the Umbazookskus, it sud-
denly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the
larches and othf^r trees approaching the bank and leaving no
open meadow, and we landed to get a black-spruce pole for
pushing against the stream. This was the first occasion for
one. The one selected was quite slender, cut about ten feet
long, merely whittled to a point, and the bark shaved off. The
stream, though narrow and swift, was still deep, with a muddy
bottom, as I proved by diving to it. Beside the plants which
I have mentioned, I observed on the bank here the Salix
cordata and rostrata, Ranunculus recurvatus, and Rubus
irijiorus with ripe fruit.

While we were thus employed, two Indians in a canoe hove
in sight round the bushes, coming down stream. Our Indian
knew one of them, an old man, and fell into conversation with
him in Indian. He belonged at the foot of Moosehead. The
other was of another tribe. They were returning from hunt-
ing. I asked the younger if they had seen any moose, to which
he said no; but I, seeing the moose-hides sticking out from
a great bundle made with their blankets in the middle of tne
canoe, added, ^^Only their hides.^^ As he was a foreigner, he
may have wished to deceive me, for it is against the law for
white men and foreigners to kill moose in Maine at this
season. But, perhaps, he need not have been alarmed, for the
moose-wardens are not very particular. I heard quite directly
of one who being asked by a white man going into the woods
what he would say if he killed a moose, answered, ‘Tf you
bring me a quarter of it, I guess you won’t be troubled.” His
duty being, as he said, only to prevent the “indiscriminate”
slaughter of them for their hides. I suppose that he would
consider it an indiscriminate slaughter when a quarter was
Mot reserved for himself. Such are the perquisites of this office.

We continued along through the most extensive larch wood
tffhich I had seen, — tall and slender trees with fantastic

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 537
branches. But though this was the prevailing tree here, I do
not remember that we saw any afterward. You do not find
straggling trees of this species here and there throughout the
wood, but rather a little forest of them. The same is the case
with the white and red pines, and some other trees, greatly
to the convenience of the lumberer. They are of a social
habit, growing in “veins,’’ “clumps,” “groups,” or “communi-
ties,” as the explorers call them, distinguishing them far
away, from the top of a hill or a tree, the white-pines towering
above the surrounding forest, or else they form extensive
forests by themselves. I should have liked to come across a
large community of pines which had never been invaded by
the lumbering army.

We saw some fresh moose tracks along the shore, but the
Indian said that the moose were not driven out of the woods
by the flies, as usual at this season, on account of the abun-
dance of water everywhere. The stream was only from one and
one half to three rods wide, quite winding, with occasional
small islands, meadows, and some very swift and shallow
places. When we came to an island, the Indian never hesitated
which side to take, as if the current told him which was the
fliortest and deepest. It was lucky for us that the water was
so high. We had to walk but once on this stream, carrying a
part of the load, at a swift and shallow reach, while he got up
with the canoe, not being obliged to take out, though he said
it was very strong water. Once or twice we passed the red
wreck of a batteau which had been stove some spring.

While making this portage I saw many splendid specimens
of the great purple-fringed orchis, three feet high. It is re-
markable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these
wilderness paths.

Having resumed our seats in the canoe, I felt the Indian
wiping my back, which he had accidentally spat upon. Hfi
said it was a sign that I was going to be married.

The Umbazookskus River is called ten miles long. Having
poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next

538 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
opening in the sky was over Umbazookskus Lake, which we
suddenly entered about eleven o’clock in the forenoon. It
stretches northwesterly four or five miles, with what the
Indian called the Caucomgomoc Mountain seen far beyond it.
It was an agreeable change.

This lake was very shallow a long distance from the shore,
and I saw stone heaps on the bottom, like those in the As-
sabet at home. The canoe ran into one. The Indian thought
that they were made by an eel. Joe Aitteon in 1853 thought
that they were made by chub. We crossed the southeast end
of the lake to the carry into Mud Pond.

Umbazookskus Lake is the head of the Penobscot in this
direction, and Mud Pond is the nearest head of the Allegash,
one of the chief sources of the St. John. Hodge, who went
through this way to the St. Lawrence in the service of the
State, calls the portage here a mile and three quarters long,
and states that Mud Pond has been found to be fourteen feet
higher than Umbazookskus Lake. As the west branch of the
Penobscot at the Moosehead carry is considered about twenty-
five feet lower than Moosehead Lake, it appears that the
Penobscot in the upper part of its course runs in a broad and
shallow valley, between the Kennebec and St. John, and lower
than either of them, though, judging from the map, you might
expect it to be the highest.

Mud Pond is about halfway from Umbazookskus to Cham-
berlain Lake, into which it empties, and to which we were
bound. The Indian said that this was the wettest carry in
the State, and as the season was a very wet one, we antic-
ipated an unpleasant walk. As usual he made one large bundle
of the pork-keg, cooking utensils, and other loose traps, by
tying them up in his blanket. We should be obliged to go over
the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part
way, and then go back for the rest.

Our path ran close by the door of a log-hut in a clearing
at this end of the carry, which the Indian, who alone entered
it, found to be occupied by a Canadian and his family, and

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 539
that the man had been blind for a year. He seemed peculiarly
unfortunate to be taken blind there, where there were so few
eyes to see for him. He could not even be led out of that
country by a dog, but must be taken down the rapids as
passively as a barrel of flour. This was the first house above
Chesuncook, and the last on the Penobscot waters, and was
built here, no doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers
in the winter and spring.

After a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil
of the Canadian’s clearing, we entered on a level and very wet
and rocky path through the universal dense evergreen forest,
a loosely paved gutter merely, where we went leaping from
rock to rock and from side to side, in the vain attempt to keep
out of the water and mud. We concluded that it was yet Penob-
scot water, though there was no flow to it. It was on this
carry that the white hunter whom I met in the stage, as he
told me, had shot two bears a few months before. They stood
directly in the path, and did not turn out for him. They might
be excused for not turning out there, or only taking the right
as the law directs. He said that at this season bears were
found on the mountains and hillsides, in search of berries,
and were apt to be saucy, — ^that we might come across them
up Trout Stream; and he added, what I hardly credited,
that many Indians slept in their canoes, not daring to sleep
on land, on account of them.

Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the
best timber land in the State. This very spot was described
as “covered with the greatest abundance of pine,” but now this
appeared to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there, —
and yet you did not see where any more could have stood,
amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc. It was then proposed
to cut a canal from lake to lake here, but the outlet was
finally made farther east, at Telos Lake, as we shall see.

The Indian with his canoe soon disappeared before us; but
erelong he came back and told us to take a path which turned
off westward, it being better walking, and, at my suggestion,

540 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
he agreed to leave a bough in the regular carry at that place,
that we might not pass it by mistake. Thereafter, he said, we
were to keep the main path, and he added, “You see ’em my
tracks.” But I had not much faith that we could distinguish
his tracks, since others had passed over the carry within a
few days.

We turned off at the right place, but were soon confused
by numerous logging- paths, coming into the one we were on,
by which lumberers had been to pick out those pines which I
have mentioned. However, we kept what we considered the
main path, though it was a winding one, and in this, at long
intervals, we distinguished a faint trace of a footstep. This,
though comparatively unworn, was at first a better, or, at
least, a drier road than the regular carry which we had left.
It led through an arbor-vitae wilderness of the grimmest char-
acter. The great fallen and rotting trees had been cut through
and rolled aside, and their huge trunks abutted on the path
on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet
high. It was impossible for us to discern the Indian’s trail in
the elastic moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock
and fallen tree, as well as the earth. Nevertheless, I did occa-
sionally detect the track of a man, and I gave myself some
credit for it. I carried my whole load at once, a heavy knap-
sack, and a large India-rubber bag, containing our bread and
a blanket, swung on a paddle; in all, about sixty pounds;
but my companion preferred to make two journeys, by short
stages, while I waited for him. We could not be sure that we
were not depositing our loads each time farther off from the
true path.

As I sat waiting for my companion, he would seem to be
gone a long time, and I had ample opportunity to make ob-
servations on the forests. I now first began to be seriously
molested by the black-fly, a very small but perfectly formed
fly of that color, about one tenth of an inch long, which I
first felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as I sat by a
wider and more than usually doubtful fork in this dark

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 541
forest path. The hunters tell bloody stories about them, — ^how
they settle in a ring about your neck, before you know it, and
are wiped off in great numbers with your blood. But remem-
bering that I had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a
thoughtful hand in Bangor, I made haste to apply it to my
face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it
was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not only against black-flies,
but all the insects that molested us. They would not alight on
the part thus defended. It was composed of sweet-oil and oil
of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor.
However, I finally concluded that the remedy was worse than
the disease, it was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have
your face and hands covered with such a mixture.

Three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus (Garrulus
Canadensis) , the Canada jay, moose-bird, meat-bird, or what
not, came flitting silently and by degrees toward me, and
hopped down the limbs inquisitively to within seven or eight
feet. They were more clumsy and not nearly so handsome as
the blue-jay. Fish-hawks, from the lake, uttered their sharp
whistling notes low over the top of the forest near me, as if
they were anxious about a nest there.

After I had sat there some time, I noticed at this fork in the
path a tree which had been blazed, and the letters ‘‘Chamb.
L.’’ written on it with red chalk. This I knew to mean
Chamberlain Lake. So I concluded that on the whole we were
on the right course, though as we had come nearly two miles,
and saw no signs of Mud Pond, I did harbor the suspicion that
we might be on a direct course to Chamberlain Lake, leaving
out Mud Pond. This I found by my map would be about five
miles northeasterly, and I then took the bearing by my
compass.

My companion having returned with his bag, and also
defended his face and hands with the insect wash, we set
forward again. The walking rapidly grew worse, and the
path more indistinct, and at length, after passing through a
patch of Calla palustris, still abundantly in bloom, we found

542 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ourselves in a more open and regular swamp, made less
passable than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season.
We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and
sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliter-
ated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar
places, when he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably
was a musquash trail in some places. We concluded that if
Mud Pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it cer-
tainly deserved its name. It would have been amusing to be-
hold the dogged and deliberate pace at which we entered that
swamp, without interchanging a word, as if determined to go
through it, though it should come up to our necks. Having
penetrated a considerable distance into this, and found a tus-
sock on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no
place to sit, my companion went back for the rest of his pack.
I had thought to observe on this carry when we crossed the
dividing line between the Penobscot and St. John, but as my
feet had hardly been out of water the whole distance, and it
was all level and stagnant, I began to despair of finding it. I re-
membered hearing a good deal about the “highlands” dividing
the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John, as well
as the St. Lawrence, at the time of the northeast boundary dis-
pute, and I observed by my map, that the line claimed by
Great Britain as the boundary prior to 1842 passed between
Umbazookskus Lake and Mud Pond, so that we had either
crossed or were then on it. These, then, according to her inter-
pretation of the treaty of ’83, were the “highlands which divide
those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence from
those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean.” Truly an interesting
spot to stand on, — if that were it, — though you could not sit
down there. I thought that if the commissioners themselves,
and the king of Holland with them, had spent a few days here,
with their packs upon their backs, looking for that “highland,”
they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it
would have modified their views of the question somewhat.
The king of Holland would have been in his element. Such

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 543
were my meditations while my companion was gone back for
his bag.

It was a cedar swamp, through which the peculiar note of
the white-throated sparrow rang loud and clear. There grew
the side-saddle flower, Labrador tea, Kalmia glauca, and,
what was new to me, the Low Birch {Betula pumila), a little
round-leafed shrub, two or three feet high only. We thought
to name this swamp after the latter.

After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian
with him. We had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had
lost us. He had very wisely gone back to the Canadian’s camp,
and asked him which way we had probably gone, since he
could better understand the ways of white men, and he told
him correctly that we had undoubtedly taken the supply road
to Chamberlain Lake (slender supplies they would get over
such a road at this season). The Indian was greatly surprised
that we should have taken what he called a “tow” tote
or toting or supply) road, instead of a carry path, — that we
had not followed his tracks, — said it was “strange,” and evi-
dently thought little of our woodcraft.

Having held a consultation, and eaten a mouthful of bread,
we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now
to keep on to Chamberlain Lake, omitting Mud Pond, than
to go back and start anew for the last place, though the
Indian had never been through this way, and knew nothing
about it. In the meanwhile he would go back and finish
carrying over his canoe and bundle to Mud Pond, cross that,
and go down its outlet and up Chamberlain Lake, and trust
to meet us there before night. It was now a little after noon.
He supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed
back from Mud Pond, which could not be far off eastward,
but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp.

Keeping on, we 'were erelong agreeably disappointed by
reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path
was more distinct, but there was never any outlook over the
forest. While descending the last, I saw many specimens el

544 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the great round-leaved orchis, of large size; one which I
measured had leaves, as usual, flat on the ground, nine and a
half inches long, and nine wide, and was two feet high. The
dark, damp wilderness is favorable to some of these orchida-
ceous plants, though they are too delicate for cultivation. I
also saw the swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre), with green
fruit, and in all the low ground, where it was not too wet, the
Rubus triflorus in fruit. At one place I heard a very clear and
piercing note from a small hawk, like a single note from a
white-throated sparrow, only very much louder, as he dashed
through the tree-tops over my head. I wondered that he al-
lowed himself to be disturbed by our presence, since it seemed
as if he could not easily find his nest again himself in that
wilderness. We also saw and heard several times the red
squirrel, and often, as before observed, the bluish scales of
the fir cones which it had left on a rock or fallen tree. This, ac-
cording to the Indian, is the only squirrel found in those
woods, except a very few striped ones. It must have a solitary
time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life,
seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. I wondered
how he could call any particular tree there his home ; and yet
he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as if
it were an old road to him. How can a hawk ever find him
there? I fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he
did seem to chide us. One of those sombre fir and spruce woods
is not complete unless you hear from out its cavernous mossy
and twiggy recesses his fine alarum, — his spruce voice, like
the working of the sap through some crack in a tree, — the
working of the spruce-beer. Such an impertinent fellow would
occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. said I,

am well acquainted with your family, I know your cousins
in Concord very well. Guess the mail’s irregular in these parts,
and you’d like to hear from ’em.” But my overtures were vain,
for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more
distant cedar-top, and spring his rattle again.

We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace,

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 545
where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account
of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated
the indistinct trail entirely. The fallen trees were so numerous,
that for long distances the route was through a succession of
small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our
heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over
another fence into a second yard, and so on; and going back
for his bag my companion once lost his way and came back
without it. In many places the canoe would have run if it had
not been for the fallen timber. Again it would be more open,
but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow, and no place to sit
down. It was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs
of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared
some of them in our transit, though we saw none. It was ready
to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of
a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of
these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger
inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a
puny red squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howl-
ing wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the
traveler that does the howling. I did, however, see one dead
porcupine; perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of
the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit
of such unkempt wildernesses.

Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called
^'swamping it,’’ and they who do the work are called
^‘swampers.” I now perceived the fitness of the term. This
was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw.
Nature must have cooperated with art here. However, I sup-
pose they would tell you that this name took its origin from
the fact that the chief work of road-makers in those woods
is to make the swamps passable. We came to a stream where
the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with
cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we could.
This probably emptied into Mud Pond, and perhaps the
Indian might have come up and taken us in there if he had

546 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
known it. Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evi-
dence that we were on a path of any kind.

We then crossed another low rising ground, and I, who
wore shoes, had an opportunity to wring out my stockings,
but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was
not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get
his wet boots on again. He went over the whole ground, or
water, three times, for which reason our progress was very
slow; beside that the water softened our feet, and to some
extent unfitted them for w^alking. As I sat waiting for him, it
would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone.
Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was
getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be,
even if we were on the right course, and in what part of
the world we should find ourselves at nightfall, I proposed
that I shall push through with what speed I could, leaving
boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the Indian,
if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry
my companion’s bag.

Having gone about a mile, and got into low ground again,
I heard a noise like the note of an owl, which I soon discovered
to be made by the Indian, and, answering him, we soon came
together. He had reached the lake, after crossing Mud Pond,
and running some rapids below it, and had come up about a
mile and a half on our path. If he had not come back to meet
us, we probably should not have found him that night, for
our path branched once or twice before reaching this partic-
ular part of the lake. So he went back for my companion and
his bag, while I kept on. Having waded through another
stream, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half
floated away, — and this was not altogether worse than our
ordinary walking, since it was less muddy, — ^we continued on,
through alternate mud and water, to the shore of Apmoojene-
gamook Lake, which we reached in season for a late supper,
instead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone with-
out our dinner. It was at least five miles by the way we had

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH S47
come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three
times, he had walked full a dozen miles, bad as it was. In
the winter, when the water is frozen, and the snow is four
feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. As it
was, I would not have missed that walk for a good deal. If you
want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part
Mud Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus
and Apmoojenegamook; then send a family of musquash
through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and
finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the
fencing.

We had come out on a point extending into Apmoojenega-
mook, or Chamberlain Lake, west of the outlet of Mud Pond,
where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encum-
bered with bleached logs and trees. We were rejoiced to see
such dry things in that part of the world. But at first we did
not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness. We all
three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash our
clothes.

This was another noble lake, called twelve miles long, east
and west; if you add Telos Lake, which, since the dam was
built, has been connected with it by dead water, it will be
twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to two
miles wide. We were about midway its length, on the south
side. We could see the only clearing in these parts, called the
^^Chamberlain Farm,’^ with two or three log buildings close
together, on the opposite shore, some two and a half miles
distant. The smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two
men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal
agreed on when one wishes to cross. It took them about half
an hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains
this time. Even the English name of the lake had a wild,
woodland sound, reminding me of that Chamberlain who
killed Paugus at Lovewell’s fight.

After putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging
the others to dry on the pole which the Indian arranged over

548 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the fire, we ate our supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore
with our feet to the fire, without pitching our tent, making a
thin bed of grass to cover the stones.

Here first I was molested by the little midge called the
No-see-em (Simulium nocivum, the latter word is not the
Latin for no-see-em), especially over the sand at the water^s
edge, for it is a kind of sand-fly. You would not observe them
but for their light-colored wings. They are said to get under
your clothes, and produce a feverish heat, which I suppose
was what I felt that night.

Our insect foes in this excursion, to sum them up, were,
first, mosquitoes, the chief ones, but only troublesome at night,
or when we sat still on shore by day; second, black flies, {Si-
mulium moles turn ) , which molested us more or less on the car-
ries by day, as I have before described, and sometimes in nar-
rower parts of the stream. Harris mistakes when he says that
they are not seen after June. Third, moose-flies. The big ones,
Polis said, were called Bososquasis, It is a stout, brown fly,
much like a horse-fly, about eleven sixteenths of an inch long,
commonly rusty colored beneath, with unspotted wings. They
can bite smartly, according to Polis, but are easily avoided or
killed. Fourth, the No-see-ems above mentioned. Of all these,
the mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously;
but, as I was provided with a wash and a veil, they have not
made any deep impression.

The Indian would not use our wash to protect his face and
hands, for fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any
veil ; he, therefore, suffered from insects now, and throughout
this journey, more than either of us. I think that he suffered
more than I did, when neither of us was protected. He reg-
ularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in
his blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between
us and the fire for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to
make enter his blanket about his face, and for the same
purp>ose he lit his pipe and breath^ the smoke into his
blanket.

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH S49

Tuesday, July 28.

When we awoke, we found a heavy dew on our blankets.
I lay awake very early, and listened to the clear, shrill ah-
tette-tette-te, of the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short
intervals, without the least variation, for half an hour, as if
it could not enough express its happiness. Whether my com-
panions heard it or not, I know not, but it was a kind of matins
to me, and the event of that forenoon.

It was a pleasant sunrise, and we had a view of the moun-
tains in the southeast. Ktaadn appeared about southeast by
south. A double-topped mountain, about southeast by east,
and another portion of the same, east-southeast. The last the
Indian called Nerlumskeechticook, and said that it was at
the head of the East Branch, and we should pass near il
on our return that way.

We did some more washing in the lake this morning, and
with our clothes hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the
shore looked like washing-day at home. The Indian, taking
the hint, borrowed the soap, and, walking into the lake,
washed his only cotton shirt on his person, then put on his
pants and let it dry on him.

I observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a
greenish flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers,
and strong linen or duck pants, which also had been white,
blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat. He
carried no change of clothing, but putting on a stout, thick
jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-
sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which
would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on
his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off
at once, ready to be gone all summer. This looked very in-
dependent; a few simple and effective tools, and no India-
rubber clothing. He was always the first ready to start in the
morning, and if it had not held some of our property, would
not have been obliged to roll up his blanket. Instead of carry-
ing a large bundle of his own extra clothing, etc., he brought

SSO THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
back the great-coats of moose tied up in his blanket. I found
that his outfit was the result of a long experience, and in the
main hardly to be improved on, unless by washing and an
extra shirt. Wanting a button here, he walked off to a place
where some Indians had recently encamped, and searched for
one, but I believe in vain.

Having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork
fat, the usual disposition of what was left at breakfast, we
crossed the lake early, steering in a diagonal direction, north-
easterly about four miles, to the outlet, which was not to be
discovered till we were close to it. The Indian name, Apmoo-
jenegamook, means lake that is crossed, because the usual
course lies across, and not along it. This is the largest of the
Allegash lakes, and was the first St. John water that we floated
on. It is shaped in the main like Chesuncook. There are no
mountains or high hills very near it. At Bangor we had been
told of a township many miles farther northwest; it was
indicated to us as containing the highest land thereabouts,
where, by climbing a particular tree in the forest, we could
get a general idea of the country. I have no doubt that the
last was good advice, but we did not go there. We did not
intend to go far down the Allegash, but merely to get a view
of the great lakes which are its source, and then return this
way to the East Branch of the Penobscot. The water now, by
good rights, flowed northward, if it could be said to flow at all.

We were now fairly on the Allegash River, which name our
Indian said meant hemlock bark. These waters flow northward
about one hundred miles, at first very feebly, then southeast'
erly two hundred and fifty more to the Bay of Fundy. After
perhaps two miles of river, we entered Heron Lake, called on
the map Pongokwahem, scaring up forty or fifty young she-
corways, sheldrakes, at the entrance, which ran over the water
with great rapidity, as usual in a long line.

This was the fourth great lake, lying northwest and south-

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 551
east, like Chesuncook, and most of the long lakes in that
neighborhood, and, judging from the map, it is about ten
miles long. We had entered it on the southwest side, and saw
a dark mountain northeast over the lake, not very far off nor
high, which the Indian said was called Peaked Mountain, and
used by explorers to look for timber from. There was also
some other high land more easterly. The shores were in the
same ragged and unsightly condition, encumbered with dead
timber, both fallen and standing, as in the last lake, owing to
the dam on the Allegash below. Some low points or islands
were almost drowned.

I saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned
out to be a great gull on a rock in the middle, which the Indian
would have been glad to kill and eat, but it flew away long
before we were near ; and also a flock of summer ducks that
were about the rock with it. I asking him about herons, since
this was Heron Lake, he said that he found the blue hcron^s
nests in the hard-wood trees. I thought that I saw a light-
colored object move along the opposite or northern shore, four
or five miles distant. He did not know what it could be, unless
it were a moose, though he had never seen a white one; but
he said that he could distinguish a moose “anywhere on shore,
clear across the lake.”

Rounding a point, we stood across a bay for a mile and a
half or two miles, toward a large island, three or four miles
down the lake. We met with ephemerae (shad-fly) midway,
about a mile from the shore, and they evidently fly over the
whole lake. On Moosehead I had seen a large deviPs-needle
half a mile from the shore, coming from the middle of the lake,
where it was three or four miles wide at least. It had probably
crossed. But at last, of course, you come to lakes so large that
an insect cannot fly across them ; and this, perhaps, will serve
to distinguish a large lake from a small one.

We landed on the southeast side of the island, which was
rather elevated and densely wooded, with a rocky shore, in
season for an early dinner. Somebody had camped there not

552 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
long before, and left the frame on which they stretched a
moose-hide, which our Indian criticized severely, thinking it
showed but little woodcraft. Here were plenty of the shells of
crayfish, or fresh-water lobsters, which had been washed
ashore, such as have given a name to some ponds and streams.
They are commonly four or five inches long. The Indian
proceeded at once to cut a canoe-birch, slanted it up against
another tree on the shore, tying it with a withe, and lay down
to sleep in its shade.

When we were on the Caucomgomoc, he recommended to
us a new way home, the very one which we had first thought
of, by the St. John. He even said that it was easier, and would
take but little more time than the other, by the East Branch
of the Penobscot, though very much farther round; and, tak-
ing the map, he showed where we should be each night, for he
was familiar with the route. According to his calculation, we
should reach the French settlements the next night after thi^
by keeping northward down the Allegash, and when we got
into the main St. John the banks would be more or less settled
all the way; as if that were a recommendation. There would
be but one or two falls, with short carrying-places, and we
should go down the stream very fast, even a hundred miles
a day, if the wind allowed ; and he indicated where we should
carry over into Eel River to save a bend below Woodstock
in New Brunswick, and so into the Schoodic Lake, and thence
to the Mattawamkeag. It would be about three hundred and
sixty miles to Bangor this way, though only about one hundred
and sixty by the other; but in the former case we should ex-
plore the St. John from its source through two thirds of its
course, as well as the Schoodic Lake and Mattawamkeag, —
and we were again tempted to go that way. I feared, how-
ever, that the banks of the St. John were too much settled.
When I asked him which course would take us through the
wildest country, he said the route by the East Branch. Partly
from this consideration, as also from its shortness, we resolved
to adhere to the latter route, and perhaps ascend Ktaadn on

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 553

the way. We made this island the limit of our excursion in
this direction.

We had now seen the largest of the Allegash lakes. The
next dam ‘^was about fifteen miles’" farther north, down the
Allegash, and it was dead water so far. We had been told
in Bangor of a man who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at that
dam, to take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bullet
from one hand to the other, for want of employment, — as if
we might want to call on him. This sort of tit-for-tat inter-
course between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden
subject, seems to have been his symbol for society.

This island, according to the map, was about a hundred
and ten miles in a straight line north-northwest from Bangor,
and about ninety-nine miles east-southeast from Quebec,
There was another island visible toward the north end of
the lake, with an elevated clearing on it; but we learned
afterward that it was not inhabited, had only been used as
a pasture for cattle which summered in these woods, though
our informant said that there was a hut on the main land near
the outlet of the lake. This unnaturally smooth-shaven,
squarish spot, in the midst of the otherwise uninterrupted
forest, only reminded us how uninhabited the country was.
You would sooner expect to meet with a bear than an ox
in such a clearing. At any rate, it must have been a surprise
to the bears when they came across it. Such, seen far or
near, you know at once to be man’s work, for Nature never
does it. In order to let in the light to the earth as on a lake,
he clears off the forest on the hillsides and plains, and
sprinkles fine grass-seed, like an enchanter, and so carpets the
earth with a firm sward.

We had for some time seen a thunder-shower coming up
from the west over the woods of the island, and heard the
muttering of the thunder, though we were in doubt whether
it would reach us; but now the darkness rapidly increasing,

SS4 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
and a fresh breeze rustling the forest, we hastily put up the
plants which we had been drying, and with one consent
made a rush for the tent material and set about pitching it.
A place was selected and stakes and pins cut in the shortest
possible time, and we were pinning it down lest it should
be blown away, when the storm suddenly burst over us.

As we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked
considerably about the sides, with our baggage at our feet,
we listened to some of the grandest thunder which I ever
heard, — rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang, in
succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky ; and the
lightning was proportionally brilliant. The Indian said, “It
must be good powder.’’ All for the benefit of the moose
and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes. I thought it
must be a place which the thunder loved, where the lightning
practised to keep its hand in, and it would do no harm to shat-
ter a few pines. What had become of the ephemerae and devil’s-
needles then? Were they prudent enough to seek harbor before
the storm? Perhaps their motions might guide the voyageur.

Looking out I perceived that the violent shower falling
on the lake had almost instantaneously flattened the waves,
— the commander of that fortress had smoothed it for us
so, — and, it clearing off, we resolved to start immediately,
before the wind raised them again.

Going outside, I said that I saw clouds still in the south-
west, and heard thunder there. The Indian asked if the
thunder went “lound” (round), saying that if it did we
should have more rain. I thought that it did. We embarked,
nevertheless, and paddled rapidly back toward the dams.
The white-throated sparrows on the shore were about, sing-
ing, Ah te^ e, e, te, e, e, te, or else ah te, e, e, te, e, e, te, e,
e, te, e, e.

At the outlet of Chamberlain Lake we were overtaken by
another gusty rain-storm, which compelled us to take shelter,
the Indian under his canoe on the bank, and we ran under
the edge of the dam. However, we were more scared than

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 555
wet. From my covert I could see the Indian peeping out from
beneath his canoe to see what had become of the rain. When
we had taken our respective places thus once or twice, the
rain not coming down in earnest, we commenced rambling
about the neighborhood, for the wind had by this time raised
such waves on the lake that we could not stir, and we feared
that we should be obliged to camp there. We got an early
supper on the dam and tried for fish there, while waiting for
the tumult to subside. The fishes were not only few, but
small and worthless, and the Indian declared that there were
no good fishes in the St. John’s waters; that we must wait
till we got to the Penobscot v;aters.

At length, just before sunset, we set out again. It was a
wild evening when we coasted up the north side of this Ap-
moojenegamook Lake. One thunder-storm was just over, and
the waves which it had raised still running with violence,
and another storm was now seen coming up in the southwest,
far over the lake ; but it might be worse in the morning, and
we wished to get as far as possible on our way up the lake
while we might. It bio wed hard against the northern shore
about an eighth of a mile distant on our left, and there was
just as much sea as our shallow canoe would bear, without
our taking unusual care. That which we kept off, and to-
ward which the waves were driving, was as dreary and har-
borless a shore as you can conceive. For a half a dozen rods
in width it was a perfect maze of submerged trees, all dead and
bare and bleaching, some standing half their original height,
others prostrate, and criss-across, above or beneath the sur-
face, and mingled with them were loose trees and limbs and
stumps, beating about. Imagine the wharves of the largest
city in the world, decayed, and the earth and planking
washed away, leaving the spiles standing in loose order, but
often of twice the ordinary height, and mingled with and
beating against them the wreck of ten thousand navies, all
their spars and timbers, while there rises from the water’s
edge the densest and grimmest wilderness, ready to supply

556 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
more material when the former fails, and you may get a
faint idea of that coast. We could not have landed if we
would, without the greatest danger of being swamped; so
blow as it might, we must depend on coasting by it. It was
twilight, too, and that stormy cloud was advancing rapidly in
our rear. It was a pleasant excitement, yet we were glad to
reach, at length, in the dusk, the cleared shore of the Cham-
berlain Farm.

We landed on a low and thinly wooded point there, and
while my companions were pitching the tent, I ran up to the
house to get some sugar, our six pounds being gone; — it was
no wonder they were, for Polis had a sweet tooth. He would
first fill his dipper nearly a third full of sugar, and then add
the coffee to it. Here was a clearing extending back from the
lake to a hill-top, with some dark-colored log buildings and
a storehouse in it, and half a dozen men standing in front of
the principal hut, greedy for news. Among them was the man
who tended the dam on the Allegash and tossed the bullet.
He having charge of the dams, and learning that we were
going to Webster Stream the next day, told me that some of
their men, who were haying at Telos Lake, had shut the
dam at the canal there in order to catch trout, and if we
wanted more water to take us through the canal, we might
raise the gate, for he would like to have it raised. The Cham-
berlain Farm is no doubt a cheerful opening in the woods,
but such was the lateness of the hour that it has left but a
dusky impression on my mind. As I have said, the influx of
light merely is civilizing, yet I fancied that they walked
about on Sundays in their clearing somewhat as in a prison-
yard.

They were unwilling to spare more than four pounds of
brown sugar, — unlocking the storehouse to get it, — since
they only kept a little for such cases as this, and they
charged twenty cents a pound for it, which certainly it was
worth to get it up there.

When I returned to the shore it was quite dark, but we

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 557
had a rousing fire to warm and dry us by, and a snug apart-
ment behind it. The Indian went up to the house to inquire
after a brother who had been absent hunting a year or two,
and while another shower was beginning, I groped about cut-
ting spruce and arbor-vitae twigs for a bed. I preferred the
arbor-vitae on account of its fragrance, and spread it particu-
larly thick about the shoulders. It is remarkable with what
pure satisfaction the traveler in these woods will reach his
camping-ground on the eve of a tempestuous night like this, as
if he had got to his inn, and, rolling himself in his blanket,
stretch himself on his six feet by two bed of dripping fir-
twigs, with a thin sheet of cotton for roof, snug as a meadow-
mouse in its nest. Invariably our best nights were those
when it rained, for then we were not troubled with mos-
quitoes.

You soon come to disregard rain on such excursions, at
least in the summer, it is so easy to dry yourself, supposing
a dry change of clothing is not to be had. You can much
sooner dry you by such a fire as you can make in the woods
than in anybody’s kitchen, the fireplace is so much larger,
and wood so much more abundant. A shed-shaped tent will
catch and reflect the heat like a Yankee-baker, and you may
be drying while you are sleeping.

Some who have leaky roofs in the towns may have been
kept awake, but we were soon lulled asleep by a steady,
soaking rain, which lasted all night. To-night, the rain not
coming at once with violence, the twigs were soon dried by
the reflected heat.

Wednesday, July 29,

When we awoke it had done raining, though it was still
cloudy. The fire was put out, and the Indian’s boots, which
stood under the eaves of the tent, were half full of water. He
was much more improvident in such respects than either of
us, and he had to thank us for keeping his oowder dry. We

558 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
decided to cross the lake at once, before breakfast, or while
we could ; and before starting I took the bearing of the shore
which we wished to strike, S. S. E. about three miles distant,
lest a sudden misty rain should conceal it when we were
midway. Though the bay in which we were was perfectly
quiet and smooth, we found the lake already wide awake
outside, but not dangerously or unpleasantly so; neverthe-
less, when you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe like
this, you do not forget that you are completely at the mercy
of the wind, and a fickle power it is. The playful waves may
at any time become too rude for you in their sport, and play
)ight on over you. We saw a few shecorways and a fish-
hawk thus early, and after much steady paddling and danc-
ing over the dark waves of Apmoojenegamook, we found our-
selves in the neighborhood of the southern land, heard the
waves breaking on it, and turned our thoughts wholly to that
side. After coasting eastward along this shore a mile or
two, we breakfasted on a rocky point, the first convenient
place that offered.

It was well enough that we crossed thus early, for the
waves now ran quite high, and we should have been obliged
to go round somewhat, but beyond this point we had com-
paratively smooth water. You can commonly go along one
side or the other of a lake, when you cannot cross it.

The Indian was looking at the hard-AVOod ridges from time
to time, and said that he would like to buy a few hundred
acres somewhere about this lake, asking our advice. It was
to buy as near the crossing-place as possible.

My companion and I, having a minute^s discussion on
some point of ancient history, were amused by the attitude
which the Indian, who could not tell what we were talking
about, assumed. He constituted himself umpire, and, judging
by our air and gesture, he very seriously remarked from time
to time, “You beat,” or “He beat.”

Leaving a spacious bay, a northeasterly prolongation of
Chamberlain Lake, on our h ft we entered through a short

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRA.NCH SS9
strait into a small lake a couple of miles over, called on the
map Telasinis, but the Indian had no distinct name for it,
and thence into Tclos Lake, which he called Paytaywecom-
gomoc, or Burnt-Ground Lake. This curved round toward
the northeast, and may have been three or four miles long
as we paddled. He had not been here since 182S. He did not
know what Telos meant; thought it was not Indian. He
used the word ''Spokelogan'' (for an inlet in the shore which
led nowhere), and when I asked its meaning said that there
was “no Indian in ’em.” There was a clearing, with a house
and barn, on the southwest shore, temporarily occupied by
some men who were getting the hay, as we had been told;
also a clearing for a pasture on a hill on the west side of
the lake.

We landed on a rocky point on the northeast side, to look
at some Red Pines {Pinus resinosa)^ the first we had noticed,
and get some CQnes, for our few which grow in Concord do
not bear any.

The outlet from the lake into the East Branch of the
Penobscot is an artificial one, and it was not very apparent
where it was exactly, but the lake ran curving far up north-
easterly into two narrow valleys or ravines, as if it had for a
long time been groping its way toward the Penobscot waters,
or remembered when it anciently flowed there; by observing
where the horizon was lowest, and following the longest of
these, we at length reached the dam, having come about a
dozen miles from the last camp. Somebody had left a line set
for trout, and the jackknife with which the bait had been cut
on the dam beside it, an evidence that man was near, and on
a deserted log close by a loaf of bread baked in a Yankee-
baker. These proved the property of a solitary hunter, whom
we soon met, and canoe and gun and traps were not far off.
He told us that it was twenty miles farther on our route to
the foot of Grand Lake, where you could catch as many trout
as you wanted, and that the first house below the foot of the
lake, on the East Branch, was Hunt’s, about forty-five miles

560 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
farther; though there was one about a mile and a half up
Trout Stream, some fifteen miles ahead, but it was rather a
blind route to it. It turned out that, though the stream was ir
our favor, we did not reach the next house till the morning ol
the third day after this. The nearest permanently inhabited
house behind us was now a dozen miles distant, so that the
interval between the two nearest houses on our route was
about sixty miles.

This hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having
already carried his canoe over, and baked his loaf, had noth-
ing so interesting and pressing to do as to observe our transit.
He had been out a month or more alone. How much more
wild and adventurous his life than that of the hunter in Con-
cord woods, who gets back to his house and the mill-dam
every night! Yet they in the towns who have wild oats to sow
commonly sow them on cultivated and comparatively ex-
hausted ground. And as for the rowdy world in the large
cities, so little enterprise has it that it never adventures in
this direction, but like vermin clubs together in alleys and
drinking-saloons, its highest accomplishment, perchance, to
run beside a fire-engine and throw brickbats. But the former
is comparatively an independent and successful man, getting
his living in a way that he likes, without disturbing his
human neighbors. How much more respectable also is the
life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods, —
having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his
subsistence directly from nature, — than that of the helpless
multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the ex-
tremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of em-
ployment by hard times!

An Indian at Oldtown had told us that we should be
obliged to carry ten miles between Telos Lake on the St.
John and Second Lake on the East Branch of the Penobscot;
but the lumberers whom we met assured us that there would

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 56l
not be more than a mile of carry. It turned out that the In-
dian, who had lately been over this route, was nearest right,
as far as we were concerned. However, if one of us could have
assisted the Indian in managing the canoe in the rapids, we
might have run the greater part of the way; but as he was
alone in the management of the canoe in such places, we
were obliged to walk the greater part. I did not feel quite
ready to try such an experiment on Webster Stream, which
has so bad a reputation. According to my observation, a bat-
teau, properly manned, shoots rap’ds as a matter of course,
which a single Indian with a canoe carries round.

My companion and I carried a good part of the baggage
on our shoulders, while the Indian took that which would be
least injured by wet in the canoe. We did not know when we
should see him again, for he had not been this way since the
canal was cut, nor for more than thirty years. He agreed to
stop when he got to smooth water, come up and find our
path if he could, and halloo for us, and after waiting a rea-
sonable time go on and try again, — and we were to look out
in like manner for him.

He commenced by running through the sluiceway and
over the dam, as usual, standing up in his tossing canoe, and
was soon out of sight behind a point in a wild gorge. This
Webster Stream is well known to lumbermen as a difficult
one. It is exceedingly rapid and rocky, and also shallow, and
can hardly be considered navigable, unless that may mean
that what is launched in it is sure to be carried swiftly down
it, though it may be dashed to pieces by the way. It is some-
what like navigating a thunderspout. With commonly an ir-
resistible force urging you on, you have got to choose your
own course each moment, between the rocks and shallows,
and to get into it, moving forward always with the utmost
possible moderation, and often holding on, if you can, that
you may inspect the rapids before you.

By the Indian^s direction we took an old path on the south
side, which appeared to keep down the stream, though at a

562 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
considerable distance from it, cutting off bends, perhaps to
Second Lake, having first taken the course from the map
with a compass, which was northeasterly, for safety. It was
a wild wood-path, with a few tracks of oxen which had been
driven over it, probably to some old camp clearing, for pas-
turage, mingled with the tracks of moose which had lately
used it. We kept on steadily for about an hour without
putting down our packs, occasionally winding around or
climbing over a fallen tree, for the most part far out of
sight and hearing of the river ; till, after walking about three
miles, we were glad to find that the path came to the river
again at an old camp ground, where there was a small open-
ing in the forest, at which we paused. Swiftly as the shallow
and rocky river ran here, a continuous rapid with dancing
waves, I saw, as I sat on the shore, a long string of sheldrakes,
which something scared, run up the opposite side of the
stream by me, with the same ease that they commonly did
down it, just touching the surface of the waves, and getting
an impulse from them as they flowed from under them; but
they soon came back, driven by the Indian, who had fallen
a little behind us on account of the windings. He shot round
a point just above, and came to land by us with considerable
water in his canoe. He had found it, as he said, ^Very strong
water,’’ and had been obliged to land once before to empty
out what he had taken in. He complained that it strained him
to paddle so hard in order to keep his canoe straight in its
course, having no one in the bows to aid him, and, shallow
as it was, said that it would be no joke to upset there, for
the force of the water was such that he had as lief I would
strike him over the head with a paddle as have that water
strike him. Seeing him come out of that gap was as if you
should pour water down an inclined and zigzag trough, then
drop a nutshell into it, and, taking a short cut to the bottom,
get there in time to see it come out, notwithstanding the rush
and tumult, right side up, and only partly full of water.

After a moment’s breathing-space, while I held his canoe,

ALLEGASK AND EAST BRANCH 563
he was soon out of sight again around another bend, and we,
shouldering our packs, resumed our course.

We did not at once fall into our path again, but made our
way with difficulty along the edge of the river, till at length,
striking inland through the forest, we recovered it. Before
going a mile we heard the Indian calling to us. He had come
up through the woods and along the path to find us, having
reached sufficiently smooth water to warrant his taking us in.
The shore was about one fourth of a mile distant, through a
dense, dark forest, and as he led us back to it, winding
rapidly about to the right and left, I had the curiosity to
look down carefully, and found that he was following his
steps backward. I could only occasionally perceive his trail
in the moss, and yet he did not appear to look down nor
hesitate an instant, but led us out exactly to his canoe. This
surprised me, for without a compass, or the sight or noise of
the river to guide us, we could not have kept our course
many minutes, and could have retraced our steps but a
short distance, with a great deal of pains and very slowly,
using a laborious circumspection. But it was evident that he
could go back through the forest wherever he had been dur-
ing the day.

After this rough walking in the dark woods it was an
agreeable change to glide down the rapid river in the canoe
once more. This river, which was about the size of our As-
sabet (in Concord), though still very swift, was almost per-
fectly smooth here, and showed a very visible declivity, a
regularly inclined plane, for several miles, like a mirror set
a little aslant, on which we coasted down. This very obvious
regular descent, particularly plain when I regarded the
water-line against the shores, made a singular impression on
me, which the swiftness of our motion probably enhanced,
so that we seemed to be gliding down a much steeper decliv-
ity than we were, and that we could not save ourselves from
rapids and falls if we should suddenly come to them. My
companion did not perceive this slope, but I have a survey-

564 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
or’s eyes, and I satisfied myself that it was no ocular illusion.
You could tell at a glance on approaching such a river, which
way the water flowed, though you might perceive no motion.
I observed the angle at which a level line would strike the
surface, and calculated the amount of fall in a rod, which did
not need to be remarkably great to produce this effect.

It was very exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling,
quite unlike floating on our dead Concord River, the coast-
ing down this inclined mirror, which was now and then
gently winding, down a mountain, indeed, between two ever-
green forests, edged with lofty dead white-pines, sometimes
slanted halfway over the stream, and destined soon to bridge
it. I saw some monsters there, nearly destitute of branches,
and scarcely diminishing in diameter for eighty or ninety
feet.

As we thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate
and drawling tone the words ^‘Daniel Webster, great lawyer,”
apparently reminded of him by the name of the stream, and
he described his calling on him once in Boston, at what he
supposed was his boarding-house. He had no business with
him, but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say.
In answer to our questions, he described his person well
enough. It was on the day after Webster delivered his
Bunker Hill oration, which I believe Polis heard. The first
time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him,
and then went away. The next time, he saw him go by the
door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in
his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. He thought that if he
had come to see Indians, they would not have treated him so.
At length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward
him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, “What do ycu want?”
and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he
was going to strike him, said to himself, “You’d better take
care, if you try that I shall know what to do.” He did not
like him, and declared that all he said “was not worth talk
about a musquash.” We suggested that probably Mr. Web-

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 565
ster was very busy, and had a great many visitors just then.

Coming to falls and rapids, our easy progress was suddenly
terminated. The Indian went along shore to inspect the water,
while we climbed over the rocks, picking berries. The pe-
culiar growth of blueberries on the tops of large rocks here
made the impression of high land, and indeed this was the
Height-of-land Stream. When the Indian came back, he re-
marked, “You got to walk; ver strong water.’' So, taking out
his canoe, he launched it again below the falls, and was soon
out of sight. At such times, he would step into the canoe,
take up his paddle, and, with an air of mystery, start off,
looking far down stream, and keeping his own counsel, as if
absorbing all the intelligence of forest and stream into him-
self ; but I sometimes detected a little fun in his face, which
could yield to my sympathetic smile, for he was thoroughly
good-humored. We meanwhile scrambled along the shore
with our packs, without any path. This was the last of our
boating for the day.

The prevailing rock here was a kind of slate, standing on
its edges, and my companion, who was recently from Cali-
fornia, thought it exactly like that in which the gold is found,
and said that if he had had a pan he would have liked to wash
a little of the sand here.

The Indian now got along much faster than we, and waited
for us from time to time. I found here the only cool spring
that I drank at anywhere on this excursion, a little water
filling a hollow in the sandy bank. It was a quite memorable
event, and due to the elevation of the country, for wherever
else we had been the water in the rivers and the streams emp-
tying in was dead and warm, compared with that of a moun-
tainous region. It was very bad walking along the shore over
fallen and drifted trees and bushes, and rocks, from time
to time swinging ourselves round over the water, or else tak-
ing to a gravel bar or going inland. At one place, the Indian
being ahead, I was obliged to take off all my clothes in
order to ford a small but deep stream emptying in, while my

566 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
companion, who was inland, found a rude bridge, high up in
the woods, and I saw no more of him for some time. I saw
there very fresh moose tracks, found a new goldenrod to me
(perhaps Solidago thyrsoidea) , and I passed one white-pine
log, which had lodged, in the forest near the edge of the
stream, which was quite five feet in diameter at the butt.
Probably its size detained it.

Shortly after this I overtook the Indian at the edge of
some burnt land, which extended three or four miles at least,
beginning about three miles above Second Lake, which we
were expecting to reach that night, and which is about ten
miles from Telos Lake, This burnt region was still more
rocky than before, but, though comparatively open, we could
not yet see the lake. Not having seen my companion for
some time, I climbed, with the Indian, a singular high rock
on the edge of the river, forming a narrow ridge only a foot
or two wide at top, in order to look for him; and, after calling
many times, I at length heard him answer from a consider-
able distance inland, he having taken a trail which led off
from the river, perhaps directly to the lake, and being now
in search of the river again. Seeing a much higher rock, of
the same character, about one third of a mile farther east, or
down stream, I proceeded toward it, through the burnt land,
in order to look for the lake from its summit, supposing that
the Indian would keep down the stream in his canoe, and
hallooing all the while that my companion might join me on
the way. Before we came together I noticed where a moose,
which possibly I had scared by my shouting, had apparently
just run along a large rotten trunk of a pine, which made a
bridge, thirty or forty feet long, over a hollow, as convenient
for him as for me. The tracks were as large as those of an
ox, but an ox could not have crossed there. This burnt land
was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. Judging by the
weeds and sprouts, it appeared to have been burnc about two
years before. It was covered with charred trunks, either pros-
trate or standing, which crocked our clothes and hands, and

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH S67
we could not easily have distinguished a bear there by his
color. Great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt without, or
burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or
forty feet high. The fire had run up inside, as in a chimney,
leaving the sap-wood. Sometimes we crossed a rocky ravine
fifty feet wide, on a fallen trunk; and there were great fields
of fire-weed {Epilobium angustij olium) on all sides, the most
extensive that I ever saw, which presented great masses of
pink. Intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry
bushes.

Having crossed a second rocky ridge like the first, when
I was beginning to ascend the third, the Indian, whom I had
left on the shore some fifty rods behind, beckoned to me to
come to him, but I made sign that I would first ascend the
highest rock before me, whence I expected to see the lake.
My companion accompanied me to the top. This was formed
just like the others. Being struck with the perfect parallel-
ism of these singular rock hills, how^ever much one might be
in advance of another, I took out my compass and found tliat
they lay northwest and southeast, the rock being on its edge,
and sharp edges they were. This one, to speak from memory,
was perhaps a third of a mile in length, but quite narrow,
rising gradually from the northwest to the height of about
eighty feet, but steep on the southeast end. The southwest
side was as steep as an ordinary roof, or as we could safely
climb, the northeast was an abrupt precipice from which
you could jump clean to the bottom, near which the river
flowed ; while the level top of the ridge, on which you walked
along, was only from one to three or four feet in width. For
a rude illustration, take the half of a pear cut in two length-
wise, lay it on its flat side, the stem to the northwest, and
then halve it vertically in the direction of its length, keep-
ing the southwest half. Such was the general form.

There was a remarkable series of these great rock-waves
revealed by the burning; breakers, as it were. No wonder
that the river that found its way through them was rapid and

S68 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
obstructed by falls. No doubt the absence of soil on these
rocks, or its dryness where there was any, caused this to be
a very thorough burning. We could see the lake over the
woods, twQ or three miles ahead, and that the river made an
abrupt turn southward around the northwest end of the cliff
on which we stood, or a little above us, so that we had cut
off a bend, and that there was an important fall in it a short
distance below us. I could see the canoe a hundred rods be-
hind, but now on the opposite shore, and supposed that the
Indian had concluded to take out and carry round some bad
rapids on that side, and that that might be what he had
beckoned to me for; but after waiting a while I could still
see nothing of him, and I observed to my companion that I
wondered where he was, though I began to suspect that he
had gone inland to look for the lake from some hill-top on
that side, as we had done. This proved to be the case; for
after I had started to return to the canoe, I heard a faint
halloo, and descried him on the top of a distant rocky hill
on that side. But as, after a long time had elapsed, I still
saw his canoe in the same place, and he had not returned
to it, and appeared in no hurry to do so, and, moreover, as
I remembered that he had previously beckoned to me, I
thought that there might be something more to delay him
than I knew, and began to return northwest, along the ridge,
toward the angle in the river. My companion, who had just
been separated from us, and had even contemplated the ne-
cessity of camping alone, wishing to husband his steps, and
yet to keep with us, inquired where I was going ; to which I
answered that I was going far enough back to communicate
with the Indian, and that then I thought we had better go
along the shore together, and keep him in sight.

When we reached the shore, the Indian appeared from out
the woods on the opposite side, but on account of the roar of
the water it was difficult to communicate with him. He kept
along the shore westward to his canoe, while we stopped
at the angle where the stream turned southward around the

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 569
precipice. I again said to my companion, that we would keep
along the shore and keep the Indian in sight. We started to
do so, being close together, the Indian behind us having
launched his canoe again, but just then I saw the latter, who
had crossed to our side, forty or fifty rods behind, beckon-
ing to me, and I called to my companion, who had just dis-
appeared behind large rocks at the point of the precipice,
three or four rods before me, on his way down the stream,
that I was going to help the Indian a moment. I did so, —
helped get the canoe over a fail, lying with my breast over a
rock, and holding one end while he received it below, — and
within ten or fifteen minutes at most I was back again at the
point where the river turned southward, in order to catch up
with my companion, while Polis glided down the river alone,
parallel with me. But to my surprise, when I rounded the
precipice, though the shore was bare of trees, without rocks,
for a quarter of a mile at least, my companion was not to be
seen. It was as if he had sunk into the earth. This was the
more unaccountable to me, because I knew that his feet
were, since our swamp walk, very sore, and that he wished to
keep with the party; and besides this was very bad walking,
climbing over or about the rocks. I hastened along, halloo-
ing and searching for him, thinking he might be concealed
behind a rock, yet doubting if he had not taken the other
side of the precipice, but the Indian had got along still faster
in his canoe, till he was arrested by the falls, about a quarter
of a mile below. He then landed, and said that we could go
no farther that night. The sun was setting, and on account of
falls and rapids we should be obliged to leave this river and
carry a good way into another farther east. The first thing
then was to find my companion, for I was now very much
alarmed about him, and I sent the Indian along the shore
down stream, which began to be covered with unburnt wood
again just below the falls, while I searched backward about
the precipice which we had passed. The Indian showed some
unwillingness to exert himself, complaining that he was very

S70 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
tired, in consequence of his day^s work, that it had strained
him very much getting down so many rapids alone; but he
went off calling somewhat like an owl. I remembered that my
companion was near-sighted, and I feared that he had either
fallen from the precipice, or fainted and sunk down amid the
rocks beneath it. I shouted and searched above and below
this precipice in the twilight till I could not see, expecting
nothing less than to find his body beneath it. For half an hour
I anticipated and believed only the worst. I thought what I
should do the next day, if I did not find him, what I could
do in such a wilderness, and how his relatives would feel, if
I should return without him. I felt that if he were really lost
away from the river there, it would be a desperate undertaking
to find him; and where were they who could help you? What
would it be to raise the country, where there were only two or
three camps, twenty or thirty miles apart, and no road, and
perhaps nobody at home? Yet we must try the harder, the less
the prospect of success.

I rushed down from this precipice to the canoe in order to
fire the Indian’s gun, but found that my companion had the
caps. I was still thinking of getting it off when the Indian re-
turned. He had not found him, but he said that he had seen
his tracks once or twice along the shore. This encouraged me
very much. He objected to firing the gun, saying that if my
companion heard it, which was not likely, on account of the
roar of the stream, it would tempt him to come toward us,
and he might break his neck in the dark. For the same reason
we refrained from lighting a fire on the highest rock. I pro-
posed that we should both keep down the stream to the lake,
or that I should go at any rate, but the Indian said, “No use,
:an’t do anything in the dark; come morning, then we find
’em. No harm, — he make ’em camp. No bad animals here,
\io gristly bears, such as in California, where he’s been, —
warm night, — he well off as you and I.” I considered that if
he was well he could do without us. He had just lived eight
years in California, and had plenty of experience with wild

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 571
beasts and wilder men, was peculiarly accustomed to make
journeys of great length, but if he were sick or dead, he was
near where we were. The darkness in the woods was by this
so thick that it alone decided the question. We must camp
where we were. I knew that he had his knapsack, with blan-
kets and matches, and, if well, would fare no worse than we,
except that he would have no supper nor society.

This side of the river being so encumbered with rocks, we
crossed to the eastern or smoother shore, and proceeded to
camp there, within two or three rods of the falls. We pitched
no tent, but lay on the sand, putting a few handfuls of grass
and twigs under us, there being no evergreen at hand. For
fuel we had some of the charred stumps. Our various bags of
provisions had got quite wet in the rapids, and I arranged
them about the fire to dry. The fall close by was the princi-
pal one on this stream, and it shook the earth under us. It
was a cool, because dewy, night; the more so, probably, ow^
ing to the nearness of the falls. The Indian complained a
good deal, and thought afterward that he got a cold there
which occasioned a more serious illness. We were not much
troubled by mosquitoes at any rate. I lay awake a good deal
from anxiety, but, unaccountably to myself, was at length
comparatively at ease respecting him. At first I had appre-
hended the worst, but now I had little doubt but that I
should find him in the morning. From time to time T
fancied that I heard his voice calling through the roar of the
falls from the opposite side of the river ; but it is doubtful if
we could have heard him across the stream there. Sometimes
I doubted whether the Indian had really seen his tracks,
since he manifested an unwillingness to make much of a
search, and then my anxiety returned.

It was the most wild and desolate region we had camped
in, where, if anywhere, one might expect to meet with be-
fitting inhabitants, but I heard only the squeak of a night-
hawk flitting over. The moon in her first quarter, in the fore
part of the night, setting over the bare rocky hills garnished

572 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
with tall, charred, and hollow stumps or shells of treeSy
served to reveal the desolation.

Thursday y July 30.

I aroused the Indian early this morning to go in search of
our companion, expecting to find him within a mile or two,
farther down the stream. The Indian wanted his breakfast
first, but I reminded him that my companion had had neither
breakfast nor supper. We were obliged first to carry our
canoe and baggage over into another stream, the main East
Branch, about three fourths of a mile distant, for Webster
Stream was no farther navigable. We went twice over this
carry, and the dewy bushes wet us through like water up to
the middle; I hallooed in a high key from time to time,
though I had little expectation that I could be heard over
the roar of the rapids, and, moreover, we were necessarily
on the opposite side of the stream to him. In going over this
portage the last time, the Indian, who was before me with
the canoe on his head, stumbled and fell heavily once, and
lay for a moment silent, as if in pain. I hastily stepped for-
ward to help him, asking if he was much hurt, but after a
moment’s pause, without replying, he sprang up and went
forward. He was all the way subject to taciturn fits, but they
were harmless ones.

We had launched our ranoe and gone but little way down
the East Branch, when I heard an answering shout from my
companion, and soon after saw him standing on a point
where there was a clearing a quarter of a mile below, and
the smoke of his fire was rising near by. Before I saw him I
naturally shouted again and again, but the Indian curtly re-
marked, ^^He hears you,” as if once was enough. It was just
below the mouth of Webster Stream. When we arrived, he
was smoking his pipe, and said that he had passed a pretty
comfortable night, though it was rather cold, on account of
the dew.

It appeared that when we stood together the previous eve-

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 573
ning, and I was shouting to the Indian across the river, he,
being near-sighted, had not seen the Indian nor his canoe,
and when I went back to the Indian^s assistance, did not see
which way I went, and supposed that we were below and not
above him, and so, making haste to catch up, he ran away
from us. Having reached this clearing, a mile or more below
our camp, the night overtook him, and he made a fire in a
little hollow, and lay down by it in his blanket, still thinking
that we were ahead of him. He thought it likely that he had
heard the Indian call once the evening before, but mistook
it for an owl. He had seen one botanical rarity before it was
dark, — pure white EpUobium angustijolium amidst the fields
of pink ones, in the burnt lands. He had already stuck up the
remnant of a lumberer^s shirt, found on the point, on a pole
by the water-side, for a signal, and attached a note to it, to
inform us that he had gone on to the lake, and that if h^ did
not find us there, he would be back in a couple of hours, if
he had not found us soon, he had some thoughts of going
back in search of the solitary hunter whom we had met at
Telos Lake, ten miles behind, and, if successful, hire him to
take him to Bangor. But if this hunter had moved as fast as
we, he would have been twenty miles off by this time, and
who could guess in what direction? It would have been like
looking for a needle in a haymow, to search for him in these
woods. He had been considering how long he could live on
berries alone.

We substituted for his note a card containing our names
and destination, and the date of our visit, which Polis neatly
inclosed in a piece of birch-bark to keep it dry. This has
probably been read by some hunter or explorer ere this.

We all had good appetites for the breakfast which we
made haste to cook here, and then, having partially dried our:
clothes, we glided swiftly down the winding stream toward
Second Lake.

As the shores became flatter with frequent gravel and
sand-bars, and the stream more winding in the lower land

574 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
near the lake, elms and ash-trees made their appearance;
also the wild yellow lily (Lilium Canadense), some of whose
bulbs I collected for a soup. On some ridges the burnt land
extended as far as the lake. This was a very beautiful lake,
two or three miles long, with high mountains on the south-
vvest side, the (as our Indian said) Nerlumskeechiicook, i.e.,
Dead-Water Mountain. It appears to be the same called
Carbuncle Mountain on the map. According to Polis, it ex-
tends in separate elevations all along this and the next lake,
which is much larger. The lake, too, I think, is called by the
same name, or perhaps with the addition of gamoc or mooc.
The morning was a bright one, and perfectly still and serene,
the lake as smooth as glass, we making the only ripple as we
paddled into it. The dark mountains about it were seen
through a glaucous mist, and the brihiant white stems of
canoe-birches mingled with the other woods around it. The
wood-thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some
loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by
the morning, came distinct over the lake to us, and, what was
remarkable, the echo which ran round the lake was much
louder than the original note; probably because, the loon
being in a regularly curving bay under the mountain, we
were exactly in the focus of many echoes, the sound being
reflected like light from a concave mirror. The beauty of the
scene may have been enhanced to our eyes by the fact that
we had just come together again after a night of some anx-
iety. This reminded me of the Ambejijis Lake on the West
Branch, which I crossed in my first coming to Maine. Having
paddled down three quarters of the lake, we came to a stands
still, while my companion let down for fish. A white (or
whitish) gull sat on a rock which rose above the surface in
mid-lake not far off, quite in harmony with the scene; and
as we rested there in the warm sun, we heard one loud crush-
ing or crackling sound from the forest, forty or fifty rods
distant, as of a stick broken by the foot of some large animal.
Even this was an interesting incident there. In the midst of

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 57i-
our dreams of giant lake-trout, even then supposed to be
nibbling, our fisherman drew up a diminutive red perch,
and we took up our paddles again in haste.

It was not apparent where the outlet of this lake was, and
while the Indian thought it was in one direction, I thought
it was in another. He said, “I bet you fourpence it is there,’'
but he still held on in my direction, which proved to be the
right one. As we were approaching the outlet, it being still
early in the forenoon, he suddenly exclaimed, “Moose!
moose!” and told us to be still. He put a cap on his gun,
and, standing up in the stern, rapidly pushed the canoe
straight toward the shore and the moose. It was a cow-moose,
about thirty rods off, standing in the water by the side of
the outlet, partly behind some fallen timber and bushes, and
at that distance she did not look very large. She was flapping
her large ears, and from time to time poking off the flies with
her nose from some part of her body. She did not appear
much alarmed by our neighborhood, only occasionally turned
her head and looked straight at us, and then gave her atten-
tion to the flies again. As we approached nearer, she got out
of the water, stood higher and regarded us more suspiciously.
Polis pushed the canoe steadily forward in the shallow water,
and I for a moment forgot the moose in attending to some
pretty rose-colored Polygonums just rising above the sur-
face, but the canoe soon grounded in the mud eight or ten
rods distant from the moose, and the Indian seized his gun
and prepared to fire. After standing still a moment, she
turned slowly, as usual, so as to expose her side, and he im-
proved this moment to fire, over our heads. She thereupon
moved off eight or ten rods at a moderate pace, across a
shallow bay, to an old standing-place of hers, behind some
fallen red maples, on the opposite shore, and there she stood
still again a dozen or fourteen rods from us, while the Indian
hastily loaded and fired twice at her, without her moving.
My companion, who passed him his caps and bullets, said
that Polis was as excited as a boy of fifteen, that his hand

S7o THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
xrembled, and he once put his ramrod back upside down.
This was remarkable for so experienced a hunter. Perhaps
he was anxious to make a good shot before us. The white
hunter had told me that the Indians were not good shots, be-
cause they were excited, though he said that we had got a good
hunter with us.

The Indian now pushed quickly and quietly back, and a
long distance round, in order to get into the outlet,— for he
had fired over the neck of a peninsula between it and the
lake, — till we approached the place where the moose had
stood, when he exclaimed, ‘‘She is a goner!’’ and was sur-
prised that we did not see her as soon as he did. There, to
be sure, she lay perfectly dead, with her tongue hanging out,
just where she had stood to receive the last shots, looking
unexpectedly large and horse-like, and we saw where the
bullets had scarred the trees.

Using a tape, I found that the moose measured just six
feet from the shoulder to the tip of the hoof, and was eight
feet long as she lay. Some portions of the body, for a foot in
diameter, were almost covered with flies, apparently the com-
mon fly of our woods, with a dark spot on the wing, and not
the very large ones which occasionally pursued us in mid-
stream, though both are called moose-flies.

Polls, preparing to skin the moose, asked me to help him
find a stone on which to sharpen his large knife. It being all
a flat alluvial ground where the moose had fallen, covered
with red maples, etc., this was no easy matter; we searched
far and wide, a long time, till at length I found a flat kind of
slate-stone, and soon after he returned with a similar one, on
which he soon made his knife very sharp.

While he was skinning the moose, I proceeded to ascertain
what kind of fishes were to be found in the sluggish and
muddy outlet. The greatest difficulty was to find a pole. It
was almost impossible to find a slender, straight pole ten or
twelve feet long in those woods. You might search half an
hour in vain. They are commonly spruce, arbor-vitae, fir, etc.,

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 577
short, stout, and branchy, and do not make good fish-poles,
even after you have patiently cut off all their tough and
scraggy branches. The fishes were red perch and chivin.

The Indian having cut off a large piece of sirloin, the up-
per lip, and the tongue, wrapped them in the hide, and
placed them in the bottom of the canoe, observing that there
was “one man,’’ meaning the weight of one. Our load had
previously been reduced some thirty pounds, but a hundred
pounds were now added, serious addition, which made our
quarters still more narrow, and considerably increased the
danger on the lakes and rapids, as well as the labor of the
carries. The skin was ours according to custom, since the
Indian was in our employ, but we did not think of claiming
it. He being a skillful dresser of moose-hides, would make it
worth seven or eight dollars to him, as I was told. He said
that he sometimes earned fifty or sixty dollars in a day at
them; he had killed ten moose in one day, though the skin-
ning and all took two days. This was the way he had got his
property. There were the tracks of a calf thereabouts, which
he said would come “by, by,” and he could get it if we cared
to wait, but I cast cold water on the project.

We continued along the outlet toward Grand Lake,
through a swampy region, by a long, winding, and narrow
dead water, very much choked up by wood, where we were
obliged to land sometimes in order to get the canoe over a
log. It was hard to find any channel, and we did not know
but we should be lost in the swamp. It abounded in ducks,
as usual. At length we reached Grand Lake, which the In-
dian called Matungamook,

We decided to camp early to-night, that we might have
ample time before dark ; so we stopped at the first favorable
shore, where there was a narrow gravelly beach on the west-
ern side, some five miles below the outlet of the lake. It was
an interesting spot, where the river began to make a great

578 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
bend to the east, and the last of the peculiar moose-faced
Nerlumskeechticook mountains not far southwest of Grand
Lake rose dark in the northwest a short distance behind, dis-
playing its gray precipitous southeast side, but we could not
see this without coming out upon the shore.

Two steps from the water on either side, and you come to
the abrupt bushy and rooty if not turfy edge of the bank,
four or five feet high, where the interminable forest begins,
as if the stream had but just cut its way through it.

It is surprising on stepping ashore anywhere into this un-
broken wilderness to see so often, at least within a few rods
of the river, the marks of the axe, made by lumberers who
have either camped here or driven logs past in previous
springs. You will see percluince where, going on the same
errand that you do, they have cut large chips from a tall
white-pine stump for their fire. While we were pitching the
camp and getting supper, tlie Indian cut the rest of the hair
from his moose-hide, and proceeded to extend it vertically
on a temporary frame bet7reen two small trees, half a dozen
feet from the opposite side of the fire, lashing and stretching
it with arbor-vitae bark r/Viich was always at hand, and in this
case was stripped from one of the trees it was tied to. Ask-
ing for a new kind of tea, he made us some, pretty good, of
the checkerberry {Gault, heria procumbens), which covered
the ground, dropping a little bunch of it tied up with cedar
bark into the kettle; but it was not quite equal to the Chio-
genes. We called this therefore Checkerberry-tea Camp.

I was struck with fJlie abundance of the Linnaa borealis,
checkerberry, and Ci'iiogenes hispidula, almost ever 3 rwhere
in the Maine woods. The wintergreen {Ckimaphila umbel-
late) was still in bloom here, and Clintonia berries were
abundant and ripe. This handsome plant is one of the most
common in that forest. We here first noticed the moose-wood
in fruit on the banks. The prevailing trees were spruce (com-
monly black), arbor-vitae, canoe-birch (black ash and elms
beginning, to appear), yellow birch, red maple, and a little

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 579
hemlock skulking in the forest. The Indian said that the
white-maple punk was the best for tinder, that yellow-birch
punk was pretty good, but hard. After supper he put on the
moose tongue and lips to boil, cutting out the septum. He
showed me how to write on the under side of birch-bark,
with a black spruce twig, which is hard and tough and can be
brought to a point.

The Indian wandered off into the woods a short distance
just before night, and, coming back, said, ‘^Me found great
treasure, — fifty, sixty dollars worth.’^ ‘‘What’s that?’’ we
asked. “Steel traps, under a log, thirty or forty, I didn’t
count ’em. I guess Indian work, — worth three dollars apiece.’^
It was a singular coincidence that he should have chanced to
walk to and look under that particular log, in that trackless
forest.

I saw chivin and chub in the stream when washing my
hands, but my companion tried in vain to catch them. I also
heard the sound of bull-frogs from a swamp on the opposite
side, thinking at first that they were moose; a duck paddled
swiftly by; and sitting in that dusky wilderness, under that
dark mountain, by the bright river which was full of reflected
light, still I heard the wood-thrush sing, as if no higher
civilization could be attained. By this time the night was
upon us.

You commonly make your camp just at sundown, and
are collecting wood, getting your supper, or pitching your
tent while the shades of night are gathering around and add-
ing to the already dense gloom of the forest. You have no
time to explore or look around you before it is dark. You
may penetrate half a dozen rods farther into that twilight
wilderness, after some dry bark to kindle your fire with, and
wonder what mysteries lie hidden still deeper in it, say at
the end of a long day’s walk; or you may run down to the
shore for a dipper of water, and get a clearer view for a
short distance up or down the stream, and while you stand
there, see a fish leap, or duck alight in the river, or hear a

580 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wood-thrush or robin sing in the woods. That is as if you
had been to town or civilized parts. But there is no saunter-
ing off to see the country, and ten or fifteen rods seems a
great way from your companions, and you come back with
the air of a much traveled man, as from a long journey, with
adventures to relate, though you may have heard the crac-
kling of the fire all the while, — and at a hundred rods you
might be lost past recovery, and have to camp out. It is all
mossy and moosey. In some of those dense fir and spruce
woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. The trees
are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell
is a plume plucked from night’s raven wing. Then at night
the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but
occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in
the woods, and if near a lake, the semi -human cry of the
loons at their unearthly revels.

To-night the Indian lay between the fire and his stretched
moose-hide, to avoid the mosquitoes. Indeed, he also made a
small smoky fire of damp leaves at his head and his feet, and
then as usual rolled up his head in his blanket. We with our
veils and our wash were tolerably comfortable, but it would
be difficult to pursue any sedentary occupation in the woods
at this season ; ycu cannot see to read much by the light of
a fire through a veil in the evening, nor handle pencil and
paper well with gloves or anointed fingers.

August 1,

I caught two or three large red chivin (Lends cus pulcheU
lus) early this morning, within twenty feet of the camp,
which, added to the moose-tongue, that had been left in the
kettle boiling over-night, and to our other stores, made a
sumptuous breakfast. The Indian made us some hemlock
tea instead of coffee, and we were not obliged to go as far
as China for it; indeed, not quite so far as for the fish. This
was tolerable, though he said it was not strong enough. It

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 581
was interesting to see so simple a dish as a kettle of water
with a handful of green hemlock sprigs in it, boiling over the
huge fire in the open air, the leaves fast losing their lively
green color, and know that it was for our breakfast.

We were glad to embark once more, and leave some of the
mosquitoes behind. We had passed the W assataquoik with-
out perceiving it. This, according to the Indian, is the name
of the main East Branch itself, and not properly applied to
this small tributary alone, as on the maps.

We found that we had camped about a mile above Hunt^s,
which is on the east bank, and is the last house for those who
ascend Ktaadn on this side.

We had expected to ascend it from this point, but my
companion was obliged to give up this on account of sore
feet. The Indian, however, suggested that perhaps he might
get a pair of moccasins at this place, and that he could walk
very easily in them without hurting his feet, wearing several
pairs of stockings, and he said beside that they were so
porous that when you had taken in water it all drained out
again in a little while. We stopped to get some sugar, but
found that the family had moved away, and the house was
unoccupied, except temporarily by some men who were
getting the hay. They told me that the road to Ktaadn left
the river eight miles above; also that perhaps we could get
some sugar at Fisk^s, fourteen miles below. I do not remem-
ber that we saw the mountain at all from the river. I noticed
a seine here stretched on the bank, which probably had been
used to catch salmon. Just below this, on the west bank, we
saw a moose-hide stretched, and with it a bear-skin, which
was comparatively very small. I was the more interested in
this sight, because it was near here that a townsman of ours,
then quite a lad, and alone, killed a large bear some years
ago. The Indian said that they belonged to Joe Aitteon, my
last guide, but how he told I do not know. He was probably
hunting near, and had left them for the day. Finding that we
were going directly to Oldtown, he regretted that he had not

582 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
taken more of the moose-meat to his family, saying that in
a short time, by drying it, he could have made it so light as
to have brought away the greater part, leaving the bones.
We once or twice inquired after the lip, which is a famous
tid-bit, but he said, ‘^That go Oldtown for my old woman;
don’t get it every day.”

Maples grew more and more numerous. It was lowering,
and rained a little during the forenoon, and, as we expected
a wetting, we stopped early and dined on the east side of a
small expansion of the river, just above what are probably
called Whetstone Falls, about a dozen miles below Hunt’s.
There were pretty fresh moose-tracks by the water-side.
There were singular long ridges hereabouts, called ^‘horse-
backs,” covered with ferns. My companion having lost his
pipe asked the Indian if he could not make him one. “Oh,
yer,” said he, and in a minute rolled up one of birch bark,
telling him to wet the bowl from time to time. Here also he
left his gazette on a tree.

We carried round the falls just below, on the west side.
The rocks were on their edges, and very sharp. The distance
was about three fourths of a mile. When we had carried over
one load, the Indian returned by the shore, and I by the
path, and though I made no particular haste, I was never-
theless surprised to find him at the other end as soon as 1.
It was remarkable how easily he got along over the worst
ground. He said to me, “I take canoe and you take the rest,
suppose you can keep along with me?” I thought that he
meant, that while he ran down the rapids I should keep along
the shore, and be ready to assist him from time to time, as
I had done before ; but as the walking would be very bad, I
answered, “I suppose you will go too fast for me, but I will
try.” But I was to go by the path, he said. This I thought
would not help the matter, I should have so far to go4o get to
the river-side when he wanted me. But neither was this what
he meant. He was proposing a race over the carry, and asked
me if I thought I could keep along with him by the same

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 583
path, adding that I must be pretty smart to do it. As his
load, the canoe, would be much the heaviest and bulkiest,
though the simplest, I thought that I ought to be able to do
it, and said that I would try. So I proceeded to gather up
the gun, axe, paddle, kettle, frj^ing-pan, plates, dippers,
carpets, etc., etc., and while I was thus engaged he threw
me his cowhide boots. “What, are these in the bargain?” I
asked. “Oh, yer,” said he; but before I could make a bundle
of my load I saw him disappearing over a hill with the
canoe on his head; so, hastily scraping the various articles
together, I started on the run, and immediately went by him
in the bushes, but I had no sooner left him out of sight in
a rocky hollow, than the greasy plates, dippers, etc., took to
themselves wings, and while I was employed in gathering
them up again, he went by me; but hastily pressing the soot5
kettle to my side, I started once more, and soon passing him
again, I saw him no more on the carry. I do not mention this
as anything of a feat, for it was but poor running on my part,
and he was obliged to move with great caution for fear of
breaking his canoe as well as his neck. When he made his
appearance, puffing and panting like myself, in answer to
my inquiries where he had been, he said, “Rocks (locks) cut
^em feet,” and laughing added, “Oh, me love to play some-
times.” He said that he and his companions when they came
to carries several miles long used to try who would get over
first ; each perhaps with a canoe on his head. I bore the sign
of the kettle on my brown linen sack for the rest of the voy-
vge.

We made a second carry on the west side, around some
falls about a mile below this. On the mainland were Norway
pines, indicating a new geological formation, and it was such
a dry and sandy soil as we had not noticed before.

As vp approached the mouth of the East Branch, we
passed two or three huts, the first sign of civilization after
Hunt’s, though we saw no road as yet ; we heard a cow-bell,
and even saw an infant held up to a small square window

584 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to see us pass, but apparently the infant and the mother that
held it were the only inhabitants then at home for several
miles. This took the wind out of our sails, reminding us that
we were travelers surely, while it was a native of the soil,
and had the advantage of us. Conversation flagged. I would
only hear the Indian, perhaps, ask my companion, ^You load
my pipe?’’ He said that he smoked alder bark, for medicine.
On entering the West Branch at Nicketow it appeared much
larger than the East. Polis remarked that the former was all
gone and lost now, that it was all smooth water hence to Old-
town, and he threw away his pole which was cut on the Um-
bazookskus. Thinking of the rapids, he said once or twice,
that you wouldn’t catch him to go East Branch again; but
he did not by any means mean all that he said.

Things are quite changed since I was here eleven years
ago. Where there were but one or two houses, I now found
quite a village, with saw-mills and a store (the latter was
locked, but its contents were so much the more safely stored) ,
and there was a stage-road to Matlawamkeag, and the rumor
of a stage. Indeed, a steamer had ascended thus far once,
when the water was very high. But we were not able to
get any sugar, only a better shingle to lean our backs against.

We camped about two miles below Nicketow, on the south
side of the West Branch, covering with fresh twigs the
withered bed of a former traveler, and feeling that we were
now in a settled country, especially when in the evening we
heard an ox sneeze in its wild pasture across the river.
Wherever you land along the frequented part of the river,
you have not far to go to find these sites of temporary inns,
the withered bed of flattened twigs, the charred sticks, and
perhaps the tent-poles. And not long since, similar beds were
spread along the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Dela-
ware, and longer still ago, by the Thames and Seine, ^jpd they
now help to make the soil where private and public gardens,
mansions and palaces are. We could not get fir-twigs for our
bed here, and the spruce was harsh in comparision, having

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 585
more twig in proportion to its leaf, but we improved it
somewhat with hemlock. The Indian remarked as before,
‘^Must have hard wood to cook moose-meat,^^ as if that were
a maxim, and proceeded to get it. My companion cooked
some in California fashion, winding a long string of the meat
round a stick and slowly turning it in his hand before the fire.
It was very good. But the Indian not approving of the mode,
or because he was not allowed to cook it his own way, would
not taste it. After the regular supper we attempted to make
a lily soup of the bulbs which I had brought along, for I
wished to learn all I could before I got out of the woods.
Following the Indian^s directions, for he began to be sick,
I washed the bulbs carefully, minced some moose-meat and
some pork, salted and boiled all together, but we had not
patience to try the experiment fairly, for he said it must be
boiled till the roots were completely softened so as to thicken
the soup like flour; but though we left it on all night, we
found it dried to the kettle in the morning, and not yet boiled
to a flour. Perhaps the roots were not ripe enough, for they
commonly gather them in the fall. As it was, it was palatable
enough, but it reminded me of the Irishman’s limestone
broth. The other ingredients were enough alone. The In-
dian’s name for these bulbs was Sheepnoc, I stirred the soup
by accident with a striped maple or moose-wood stick, which
I had peeled, and he remarked that its bark was an emetic.

He prepared to camp as usual between his moose-hide
and the fire, but it beginning to rain suddenly, he took
refuge under the tent with us, and gave us a song before
falling asleep. It rained hard in the night, and spoiled another
box of matches for us, which the Indian had left out, for he
was very careless ; but, as usual, we had so much the better
night for the rain, since it kept the mosquitoes down.

Sunday y August 2,

Was a cloudy and unpromising morning. One of U5 ob-

S86 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
served to the Indian, ^‘You did not stretch your moose-hide
last night, did you, Mr. Polis?’’ Whereat he replied, in a tone
of surprise, though perhaps not of ill humor: ‘What you ask
me that question for? Suppose I stretch ’em, you see ’em.
May be your way of talking, may be all right, no Indian
way.” I had observed that he did not wish to answer the
same question more than once, and was often silent when it
was put again for the sake of certainty, as if he were moody.
Not that he was incommunicative, for he frequently com-
menced a long-winded narrative of his own accord, — repeated
at length the tradition of some old battle, or some passage
in the recent history of his tribe in which he had acted a
prominent part, from time to time drawing a long breath,
and resuming the thread of his tale, with the true story-
teller’s leisureliness, perhaps after shooting a rapid, — prefac-
ing with “we-ll-by-by,” etc., as he paddled along. Especially
after the day’s work was over, and he had put himself in
posture for the night, he would be unexpectedly sociable,
exhibit even the bonhommie of a Frenchman, and we would
fall asleep before he got through his periods.

Nicketow is called eleven miles from Mattawamkeag by
the river. Our camp was, therefore, about nine miles from
the latter place.

The Indian was quite sick this morning with the colic. I
thought that he was the worse for the moose-meat he had
eaten.

We reached the Mattawamkeag at half past eight in the
morning, in the midst of a drizzling rain, and after buying
some sugar set out again.

The Indian growing much worse, we stopped in the north
part of Lincoln to get some brandy for him, but failing in
this, an apothecary recommended Brandreth’s pills, which
he refused to take, because he was not acquainted with
them. He said to me, “Me doctor, — first study my case, find
out what ail ’em, — then I know what to take.” We dropped
down a little farther, and stopped at mid-forenoon on an

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 587
island and made him a dipper of tea. Here, too, we dined
and did some washing and botanizing, while he lay on the
bank. In the afternoon we went on a little farther, though
the Indian was no better. ‘^Burntibus,” as he called it, was
a long, smooth, lake-like reach below the Five Islands. He
said that he owned a hundred acres somewhere ap this way.
As a thunder-shower appeared to be coming up, we stopped
opposite a barn on the west bank, in Chester, about a mile
above Lincoln. Here at last we were obliged to spend the rest
of the day and night, on account of our patient, whose sick-
ness did not abate. He lay groaning under his canoe on the
bank, looking very woe-begone, yet it was only a common
case of colic. You would not have thought, if you had seen
him lying about thus, that he was the proprietor of so many
acres in that neighborhood, was worth $6,000, and had been
to Washington. It seemed to me that, like the Irish, he made
a greater ado about his sickness than a Yankee does, and was
more alarmed about himself. We talked somewhat of leav-
ing him with his people in Lincoln, — for that is one of their
homes, — and taking the stage the next day, but he objected
on account of the expense, saying, “Suppose me well in
morning, you and I go Oldtown by noon.”

As we were taking our tea at twilight, while he lay groan-
ing still under his canoe, having at length found out “what
ail him,” he asked me to get him a dipper of water. Taking
the dipper in one hand he seized his powder-horn with the
other, and pouring into it a charge or two of powder, stirred
it up with his finger, and drank it off. This was all he took
to-day after breakfast beside his tea.

To save the trouble of pitching our tent, when we had
secured our stores from wandering dogs, we camped in the
solitary half-open barn near the bank, with the permission
of the owner, lying on new-mown hay four feet deep. The fra-
grance of the hay, in which many ferns, etc., were mingled,
was agreeable, though it was quite alive with grasshoppers
which you could hear crawling through it. This served to

588 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
graduate our approach to houses and feather-beds. In the
night some large bird, probably an owl, flitted through over
our heads, and very early in the morning we were awakened
by the twittering of swallows which had their nests there.

Monday, August 3,

We started early before breakfast, the Indian being con-
siderably better, and soon glided by Lincoln, and after
another long and handsome lake-like reach, we stopped to
breakfast on the w^est shore, two or three miles below this
town.

We frequently passed Indian islands with their small
houses on them. The Governor, Aitteon, lives in one of them,
in Lincoln.

The Penobscot Indians seem to be more social, even, than
the whites. Ever and anon in the deepest wilderness of Maine,
you come to the log-hut of a Yankee or Canada settler, but
a Penobscot never takes up his residence in such a solitude.
They are not even scattered about on their islands in the
Penobscot, which are all within the settlements, but gath-
ered together on two or three, — though not always on the
best soil, — evidently for the sake of society. I saw one or
two houses not now used by them, because, as our Indian
Polis said, they were too solitary.

The small river emptying in at Lincoln is the Matanan-
cook, which also, we noticed, was the name of a steamer
moored there. So we paddled and floated along, looking into
the mouths of rivers. When passing the Mohawk Rips, or, as
the Indian called them, “Mohog lips,’’ four or five miles be-
low Lincoln, he told us at length the story of a fight between
his tribe and the Mohawks there, anciently, — ^how the latter
were overcome by stratagem, the Penobscots using concealed
knives, — ^but they could not for a long time kill the Mohawk
chief, who was a very large and strong man, though he was

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 58^
attacked by several canoes at once, when swimming alone
in the river.

From time to time we met Indians in their canoes, going
up river. Our man did not commonly approach them, but
exchanged a few words with them at a distance in his tongue.
These were the first Indians we had met since leaving the
Umbazookskus.

At Piscataquis Falls, just above the river of that name,
we walked over the wooden railroad on the eastern shore,
about one and a half miles long, while the Indian glided
down the rapids. The steamer from Oldtown stops here,
and passengers take a new boat above. Piscataquis, whose
mouth we here passed, means “branch.’’ It is obstructed
by falls at its mouth, but can be navigated with batteaux or
canoes above through a settled country, even to the neighbor-
hood of Moosehead Lake, and we had thought at first of
going that way. We were not obliged to get out of the canoe
after this on account of falls or rapids, nor, indeed, was it
quite necessary here. We took less notice of the scenery to-
day, because we were in quite a settled country. The river
became broad and sluggish, and we saw a blue heron wing-
ing its way slowly down the stream before us.

We passed the Passadumkeag River on our left and saw the
blue Olamon mountains at a distance in the southeast. Here-
abouts our Indian told us at length the story of their con-
tention with the priest respecting schools. He thought a great
deal of education and had recommended it to his tribe. His
argument in its favor was, that if you had been to college
and learnt to calculate, you could “keep ’em property, — no
other way.” He said that his boy was the best scholar in the
school at Oldtown, to which he went with whites. He him-
self is a Protestant, and goes to church regularly at Oldtown.
According to his account, a good many of his tribe are Protes-
tants, and many of the Catholics also are in favor of schools.
Some years ago they had a schoolmaster, a Protestant, whom
they liked very well. The priest came and said that they

.590 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
must send him away, and finally he had such influence, tell-
ing them that they would go to the bad place at last if they
retained him, that they sent him away. The school party,
though numerous, were about giving up. Bishop Fenwick
came from Boston and used his influence against them. But
our Indian told his side that they must not give up, must
hold on, they were the strongest. If they gave up, then they
would have no party. But they answered that it was “no use,
priest too strong, we^d better give up.” At length he per-
suaded them to make a stand.

The priest was going for a sign to cut down the liberty-
pole. So Polls and his party had a secret meeting about it;
he got ready fifteen or twenty stout young men, “stript ’em
naked, and painted ’em like old times,” and told them that
when the priest and his party went to cut down the liberty-
pole they w^ere to rush up, take hold of it, and prevent them,
and he assured them that there would be no war, only a
noise, “no war where priest is.” He kept his men concealed
in a house near by, and when the priest’s party were about
to cut down the liberty-pole, the fall of which would have
been a death-blow to the school-party, he gave a signal, and
his young men rushed out and seized the pole. There was a
great uproar, and they were about coming to blows, but the
priest interfered, saying, “No war, no war,” and so the pole
stands, and the school goes on still.

We thought that it showed a good deal of tact in him, to
seize this occasion and take his stand on it; proving how well
he understood those with whom he had to deal.

The Olamon River comes in from the east in Greenbush
a few miles below the Passadumkeag. When we asked the
meaning of this name, the Indian said there was an island
opposite its mouth which was called Olarmon, That in old
times, when visitors were coming to Oldtown, they used to
stop there to dress and fix up or paint themselves. “What is
that which ladies used?’^ he asked. Rouge? Red Vermilion?

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 591
he said, ^‘that is larmon, a kind of clay or red paint,
which they used to get here.’’

We decided that we, too, would stop at this island, and fix
up our inner man, at least, by dining.

It was a large island, with an abundance of hemp nettle,
but I did not notice any kind of red paint there. The Olamon
River, at its mouth at least, is a dead stream. There was
another large island in that neighborhood, which the Indian
called ^'Soogle^* (i.e., Sugar) Island.

About a dozen miles before reaching Oldtown he inquired,
‘‘How you like ’em your pilot?” But we postponed an answer
till we had got quite back again.

The Sunkhaze, another short dead stream, comes in from
the east two miles above Oldtown. There is said to be some
of the best deer ground in Maine on this stream. Asking the
meaning of this name, the Indian said, “Suppose you are
going down Peqobscot, just like we, and you see a canoe
come out of bank and go along before you, but you no see
’em stream. That is SunkhazeT

He had previously complimented me on my paddling, say-
ing that I paddled “just like anybody,” giving me an Indian
name which meant “great paddler.” When off this stream he
said to me, who sat in the bows, “Me teach you paddle.” So
turning toward the shore he got out, came forward and
placed my hands as he wished. He placed one of them quite
outside the boat, and the other parallel with the first, grasp^
ing the paddle near the end, not over the flat extremity, am
told me to slide it back and forth on the side of the canoe
This, I found, was a great improvement which I had no(
thought of, saving me the labor of lifting the paddle eacl
time, and I wondered that he had not suggested it before, li
is true, before our baggage was reduced we had been obliged
to sit with our legs drawn up, and our knees above the side
of the canoe, which would have prevented our paddling thus^
or perhaps he was afraid of wearing out his canoe, by con^
stant friction on the side.

592 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

I told him that I had been accustomed to sit in the stern,
and lift my paddle at each stroke, getting a pry on the side
each time, and I still paddled partly as if in the stern. He
then wanted to see me paddle in the stern. So, changing pad-
dles, for he had the longer and better one, and turning end
for end, he sitting flat on the bottom and I on the crossbar,
he began to paddle very hard, trying to turn the canoe,
looking over his shoulder and laughing, but finding it in vain
he relaxed his efforts, though we still sped along a mile or
two very swiftly. He said that he had no fault to find with
my paddling in the stern, but I complained that he did not
paddle according to his own directions in the bows.

Opposite the Sunkhaze is the main boom of the Penobscot,
where the logs from far up the river are collected and as-
sorted.

As we drew near to Oldtown I asked Polis if he was not
glad to get home again; but there was no relenting to his
wildness, and he said, ^Tt makes no difference to me where
I am.’’ Such is the Indian’s pretense always.

We approached the Indian Island through the narrow
strait called “Cook.” He said, “I ’xpect we take in some water
there, river so high, — never see it so high at this season. Very
rough water there, but short; swamp steamboat once. Don’t
you paddle till I tell you, then you paddle right along.” It
was a very short rapid. When we were in the midst of it he
shouted “paddle,” and we shot through without taking in a
drop.

Soon after the Indian houses came in sight, but I could not
at first tell my companion which of two or three large white
ones was our guide’s. He said it was the one with blinds.

We landed opposite his door at about four in the afternoon,
having come some forty miles this day. From the Piscataquis
we had come remarkably and unaccountably quick, probably
as fast as the stage or the boat, though the last dozen miles
was dead water.

Polis wanted to sell us his canoe, said it would last seven or

ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH 593
eight years, or with care, perhaps ten; but we were not ready
to buy it.

We stopped for an hour at his house, where my companion
shaved with his razor, which he pronounced in very good
condition. Mrs. P. wore a hat and had a silver brooch on her
breast, but she was not introduced to us. The house was
roomy and neat. A large new map of Oldtown and the In-
dian Island hung on the wall, and a clock opposite to it.
Wishing to know when the cars left Oldtown, Polis’s son
brought one of the last Bangor papers, which I saw was
directed to ^‘Joseph Polis,” from the office.

This was the last that I saw of Joe Polis. We took the
last train, and reached Bango»* that night.

WALKING

[This is the complete essay which was first pub-
lished in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 ,]

WALKING

I WISH to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom
and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture
merely civil, ^to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part
and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an
emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization;
the minister and the school-committee and every one of you
will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of
my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking
walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which
word is beautifully derived ^‘from idle people who roved
about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre , to the Holy Land,
till the children exclaimed, ^^There goes a Sainte-Terrer,^^ a
Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy
Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers
and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in
the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would de-
rive the word from sans terre, without land or home, which,
therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular
home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret
of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the
time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in
the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river,
which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course
to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most

597

598 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade,
preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and
reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the
walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-
ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come
round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we
set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should
go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undy-
ing adventure, never to return, — ^prepared to send back our
embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother
and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them
again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will,
and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are
ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and
I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancy-
ing ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not
Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walk-
ers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The
chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider
seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into,
the Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a
sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and
People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced
this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own
assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would
fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth
can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence
which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the
grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven
to become a walker. You must be born into the family of
the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my towns-
men, it is true, can remember and have described to me

WALKING 599

some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they
were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the
woods ; but I know very well that they have confined them-
selves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they
may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were
elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous
state of existence, when even they were foresters and out-
laws.

“When he came to grene wode,

In a mery mornynge.

There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.

“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here;

Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.’^

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless
I spend four hours a day at least, — and it is commonly more
than that, — sauntering through the woods and over the hills
and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thou-
sand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the me-
chanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all
the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed
legs, so many of them, — as if the legs were made to sit upon,
and not to stand or walk upon, — I think that they deserve
some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day with-
out acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen
forth for a walk at the eleventh hour or four o’clock in the
afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of
night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight
have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, — 1

600 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to
s^y nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who
confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for
weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know
not what manner of stuff they are of, — sitting there now at
three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in
the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-
morning courage, bui it is nothing to the courage which can
sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against
one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve
out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of
sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between
four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morn-
ing papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not
a general explosion heard up and down tlie street, scattering
a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to
the four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more
than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to sus-
pect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early
in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the
village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past
those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have
such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers
that probably about these times their occupants are all gone
to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory
of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever
stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good
deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still
and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vesper-
tinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last
he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the
walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to
taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at

WALKING 601

stated hours, — as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs ; but is
itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would
get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a
man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs
are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him !

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be
the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler
asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study,
she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of
doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no
doubt produce a certain roughness of character, — will cause
a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of
our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor
robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying
in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and
smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an
increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should
be more susceptible to some influences important to our in-
tellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind
blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that
is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural
remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night
bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to ex-
perience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in
our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant
with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch
thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is
mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself
white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods:
what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a
mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity
of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to
the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,”

602 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the
air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods,
if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens
that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without
getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain
forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to
society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake
off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head
and I am not where my body is, — I am out of my senses. In
my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business
have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the
woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I
find myself so implicated even in what are called good works,
— for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for sc
many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes
for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An
absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still
get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will
carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A
single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes
as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in
fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities
of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the
limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten
of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the
building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of
all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it
more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by
burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences
half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and
some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds,
while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old
post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw

WALKING 603

him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded
by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three
little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking
nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house,
without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink
do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the
meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my
vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see
civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their
works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their
burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school,
trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even
politics, the most alarming of them all, — I am pleased to see
how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but
a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads
to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go
to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that
market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you
straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not
occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the
forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to
some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not
stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently,
politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of
expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body
of which roads are the arms and legs, — a trivial or quadrivial
place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word
is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more
anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry,
because the villa is the place to and from which things are car-
ried. They who got their living by teaming were said vella-
turam jacere. Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile;
also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers

604 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and
over them, without traveling themselves.

Some do not walk at all ; others walk in the highways ; a
few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of
business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, be-
cause I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or
livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to
travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter
uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make
that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the
old prophets and poets. Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer,
walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America;
neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest
were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in
mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I
have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden
with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are
nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road,
which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless
that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder
to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one
or two such roads in every town.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;

Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,

And Elijah Wood,

I fear for no good:

No other man.

Save Elisha Dugan, —

O man of wild habits^

WALKING
Partridges and rabbits,

Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,

Who liv’st all alone.

Close to the bone.

And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.

When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it.

For nobody wears it;

It is a living way.

As the Christians say.

Not many there be
Who enter therein.

Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it.

But a direction out there.

And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.

It is worth going to see
Where you might be.

What king
Did the thing,

I am still wondering;

Set up how or when.

By what selectmen,

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

60 S

606 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever;

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveler might groan,

And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know one or two
lanes that would do,

Literature that might stand
All over the land.

Which a man could remember
Till next December,

Aiid read again in the Spring,

After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,

You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of ihe land is
not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the
walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day
will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called
pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multipled,
and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men
to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s
earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gen-
tleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly
to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of i*. Let us
improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine

WALKING 607

whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle
magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to
it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way
we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would
fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this
actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which
we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and some-
times, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction,
because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, iincertain as yet
whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my in-
stinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as il
may seem, that I finally and Inevitably settle southwest,,
toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture
or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, — varies
a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it
is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it
always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted
and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my
walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like
one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be
non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in
which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round
and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into
the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; bu^
westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard
for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient
wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not
excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that
the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches un-
interruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns
nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me
live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilder-

608 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness, I should not lay so much
stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like
this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must
walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe, And that way
the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress
from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed
the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settle-
ment of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde move-
ment, and, judging from the moral and physical character
of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a
successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there
is nothing west beyond Thibet. 'The world ends there, say
they; "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.’’ It is
unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works
of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go
westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and
adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage
over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old
World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time,
there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it
arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe
of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evi-
dence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent
in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race;
but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in
birds and quadrupeds,— which, in some instances, is known
to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a gen-
eral and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say
some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip,
with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams
with their dead, — that something like the juror which affects
the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a
worm in their tails,' — affects both nations and individual^

WALKING 609

either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild
geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles
the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I
should probably take that disturbance into account.

‘^Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.

And palmer es for to seken strange strondes.’'

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire
to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the
sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and
tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer
whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those moun-
tain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only,
which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis,
and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of
terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of
the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not
seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the
gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those
fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than
any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for
Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented
fresh pastures from afar.

‘^And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’*

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal
extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fer*
tile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the
same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux,
who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large

610 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
trees are much more numerous in North America than in
Europe; in the United States there are more than one hun-
dred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in
France there are but thirty that attain this size.^’ Later
botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt
came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical
vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the
primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilder-
ness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described.
The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther, —
farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he
says: ^^As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable
world is made for the animal world, America is made for the
man of the Old World. . . . The man of the Old World sets
out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he de-
scends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his
steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preced-
ing, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the
Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the
bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his foot-
prints for an instant.^’ When he has exhausted the rich soil
of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.’^ So far
Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the
barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise
of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels
West of the Alleghanies in 1802,’’ says that the common
inquiry in the newly settled West was, “ Trom what part
of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common
country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say. Ex Oriente
lux; ex Occidente frux. From the East light; from the West
fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-

WALKING 611

General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and
southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not
only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted
the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than
she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.
. . . The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the
sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the
moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is
louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the
rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer,
the forests bigger, the plains broader.’’ This statement will
do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part oi
the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies Ixta, glabrc
plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and
smooth in the aspect of American plants;” and I think that
in this country there are no, or at most very few, Ajricance
bestiXy African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that
in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation
of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre
of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabi-
tants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can
lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North
America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks
larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger
also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and
the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical'’
of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and re-
ligion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, per-
chance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher
to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as
much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react
on man, — as there is something in the mountain-air that
feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater
perfection intellectually as well as physically under these

612 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there
are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative,
that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal,
as our sky, — our understanding more comprehensive and
broader, like our plains, — our intellect generally on a
grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers
and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall even cor-
respond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland
seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something,
he knows not what, of Iceta and glabra, of joyous and serene,
in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on,
and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say, —

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam
in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than
the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New
England; though we may be estranged from the South, we
sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger
sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for
their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is
more important to understand even the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine.
It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its
historic stream in something more than imagination, under
bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes,
past cities and castles whose very names were music to my
ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There
were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which
I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me
chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its
vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders
departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell

WALKING 613

of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic
age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi,
and as I worked my way up the river in the light of to-day,
and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising
cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians
moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked
up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri
and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona^s Cliff, — -
still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,
— I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind;
that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the
famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and
I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it
net, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest
of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the
Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in
Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends
its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at
any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and
wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Re-
mus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable.
The founders of every state which has risen to eminence
have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild
source. It was because the children of the Empire were not
suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced
by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the
night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of
hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitse in our tea. There is a differ-
ence between eating and drinking for strength and from mere
gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the

614 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some
of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic
reindeer, as well as the various other parts, including the
summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein,
perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris.
They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is prob-
ably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to
make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civiliza-
tion can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos
devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the
wood-thrush, to which I would migrate, — ^wild lands where
no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already
acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the
eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed,
emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would
have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a
part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus
sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us
of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no
disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the
odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than
that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the
scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and
handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains
and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty
merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and
perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, — a,
denizen of the woods. ^The pale white man!” I do not
wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist
says, ^^A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was
like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with
a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open
fields.”

WALKING 615

Ben Jonson exclaims, —

“How near to good is what is fair I”

So I would say, —

How near to good is what is wild\

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.
Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One
who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his
labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life,
would always find himself in a new country or wilderness,
and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be
ciimbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees,
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and culti-
vated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious
and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my
partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchas-
ing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by
a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, —
a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which
dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the
swamps which surround my native town than from the culti-
vated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres
to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda {Cas-
sandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the
earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the
names of the shrubs which grow there,- 'the high-blueberry,
panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all
standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I
should like to have my house front on this mass of dull
red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, trans-
planted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks, — to have
this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported
barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown

616 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor,
behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage
of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which
I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make
a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have
departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the
dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never
an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate orna-
ments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted
me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then
(though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so
that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards
are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you
could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were pro-
posed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beauti-
ful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a
Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.
How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me I

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward
dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness 1
In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want
of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it:
^^Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial,
hospitable and single-minded. ... In the desert, spirituous
liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a
mere animal existence.’^ They who have been traveling long
on the steppes of Tartary say: ‘‘On reentering cultivated
lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization
oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and
we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia,” When
I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thick-
est and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal
swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, — a sanctum sane-'
torum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The
‘wild-wood covers the virgin-mould, — ^and the same soil is

WALKING 617

good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many
acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of
muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A
town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by
the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where
one primitive forest waves above while another primitive
forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only
corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming
ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest,
and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating
locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of
a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.
A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled
from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive
and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle
which hardened, and consolidated the fibres of men’s
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively
degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot col-
lect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we no longer
produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have
been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently
rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil
is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be ex^
pected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted,
and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of it?
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own
superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his
marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American ‘Ho work the
virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes pro-
portions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer
displaces the Indian even- because he redeems the meadow,
and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more
natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single

618 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through
a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the
words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal
regions, — “Leave all hope, ye that enter,’^ — ^that is, of ever
getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer
actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his prop-
erty, though it was still winter. He had another similar
swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was com-
pletely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third
swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to
me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for
any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained.
And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the
^vhole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by
the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the t3^e of
a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most impor-
tant victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms
from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but
the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the boghoe,
rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with
the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew
the Indian’s corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the
way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no bettei
implement with which to intrench himself in the land than
a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plough and
spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness
is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free
and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the
Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that
delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful
than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which
’mid falling dews wings its way* above the fens. A truly
good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and
unaccountably fair and perfect^ as a wild flower discovered

WALKING 619

on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.
Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the
lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of
knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-
stone of the race, which pales before the light of common
day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the
Lake Poets, — Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even
Shakespeare, included, — breathes no quite fresh and, in this
sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized
literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a
greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of
genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.
Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not
when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another
thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries
of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys
no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
He would be a poet who could impress the winds and
streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words
to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in
the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his
words as often as he used them, — transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were
so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to
expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they
lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,
— ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, an-
nually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surround-
ing Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately
expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this
side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find
in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which con-

620 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
tents me of that Nature with which even I am acqui!t.ted.
You will perceive that I demand something which no
Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short,
can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How
much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology
its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop
which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, be-
fore the fancy and imagination were affected with blight;
and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is un-
abated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which
overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-
tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether
that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other
literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the
East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine
having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the
valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Law-
rence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when,
in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction
of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,
— the poets of the world will be inspired by American
mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less
true, though they may not recommend themselves to the
sense which is most common among Englishmen and Ameri-
cans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to
the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis
as \yell as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are
reminiscent, — others merely sensible, as the phrase is, —
others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy
forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures
of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful em-
bellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms
of fossil species which were extinct before man was created,
and hence “.indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a

WALKING 621

previous state of organic existence.’’ The Hindoos dreamed
that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may
be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here
to state, that a fossile tortoise has lately been discovered in
Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I
am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order
of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation
of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those
that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is some-
thing in a strain of music, whether produced by an instru-
ment or by the human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in
a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to
speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild
beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness
as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbor?
wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but
a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and
lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their
native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost
their original wild habits and vigor ; as when my neighbor’s
cow breaks out of her pasture early in. the spring and boldly
swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods
wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing
the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the
herd in my eyes, — ^already dignified. The seeds of instinct
are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses,
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day
a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and
frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens.
They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up
and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as
by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alasT

622 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at
once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their
sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One
has cried, ^Whoa!’^ to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle,
like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they
move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meet-
ing the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip
has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think
of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a
side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before
they can be made the slaves of men, and that men them-
selves have some wild oats still left to sow before they be-
come submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men
are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the
majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposi-
tion, this is no reason why the others should have their na-
tures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.
Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in
order that they might be various. If a low use is to be
served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another;
if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any
man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other
man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illus-
tration did. Confucius says, ‘‘The skins of the tiger and the
leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog
and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true cul-
ture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep
ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best
use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign
language, as of military officers, or of authors who have
written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more
that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for

WALKING 62 h

instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a
whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the
Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if
they had been named by the child’s rigmarole , — lery wiery
ichery van, tittle-tol-tan, I see in my mind a herd of wild
creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman
has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The
names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as
Bose and Tray, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if
men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It
would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the
race or variety, to know the individual. We are not pre-
pared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army
had a name of his own, — because we have not supposed that
he had a character of his own.

At present our. only true names are nicknames. I knew
a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster”
by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian
name. Some travelers tell us that an Indian had no name
given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame;
and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every
new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for con-
venience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me,
but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name
cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to
a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in
the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage
name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that
my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or
Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to
him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or
inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin
at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking
or else melodious tongue.

624 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours. Nature,
lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for
her children, as the leopard ; and yet we are so early weaned
from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclu-
sively an interaction of man on man,-: — a sort of breeding in
and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility,
a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in 'he best institutions of men, it is easy to
detect , a certain precocity. When we should still be growing
children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which
imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the
soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, and im-
proved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of
would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if,
instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a
fooPs allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce,
a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,’’ that power in the sun’s
rays which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks,
and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike
destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and,
but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon
perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the
agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those
bodies which underwent this change during the daylight
possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original
conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement
was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred
that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic
creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic king-
dom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives
place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man
cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of
earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part

WALKING 625

will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate
use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the
annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those
which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term
to express this wild and dusky knowledge, Gramdtica parda,
tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that
same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like.
Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge,
a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of
our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know
something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual
ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive
ignorance ; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years
of patient industry and reading of the newspapers, — for
what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? —
a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his
memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saun-
ters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were,
goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind
in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, — Go to grass. You have
eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green
crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures
before the end of May; though I have heard of one un-
natural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her
on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but
beautiful, — ^while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes
worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best
man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject,
and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing,

026 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that
he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire
to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is
perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to
is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do
not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything
more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowl-
edge before, — a discovery that there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It
is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know
in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look
serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: A

voa)v, Qv xetvov vof]oeig, — ‘‘You will not perceive that, as
perceiving a particular thing,’’ say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a
law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at
and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law.
It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which
binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.
Live free, child of the mist, — ^and with respect to knowledge
we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty
to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to
the law-maker. ‘‘That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana,
“which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for
our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all
other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our
histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds;
how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured
that I am growing apace and ranRly, though my very growth
disturb this dull equanimity, — though it be with struggle
through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would

WALKING 627

be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of
this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others ap-
pear to have been exercised in their minds more than we:
they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district
schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet,
though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more
to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as per-
chance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by
without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable laW/
our life goes by and the cars return.

‘‘Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen.

And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens.

Why hast tnou left my ear so soon?’^

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to
society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction
to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstand-
ing their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beau-
tiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appre-
ciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us!
We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Koopog,
Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so,
and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort
of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make
occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and
allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat
are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I
would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and
")loughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me
the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and univer-
sal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in
the familiar fields which stretch around my native town some-

628 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
times finds himself in another land than is described in their
owners’ deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the con-
fines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and
the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be sug-
gested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these
bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through
a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade
from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the
painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world
with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and
it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I
saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately
pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood
as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and
altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in
that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, — to
whom the sun was servant, — who had not gone into society
in the village, — who had not been called on. I saw their
park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in
Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them
with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to
vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I
heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed
to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads di-
rectly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,
as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the
reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not
know that he is their neighbor, — notwithstanding 1 heard him
whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can
equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply
a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics
were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There
was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weav-
ing or spinning. Yet X did detect, when the wind lulled and

WALKING 629

hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical
hum, — as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the
sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no
one without could see their work, for their industry was not
as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevo-
cably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to
recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and
serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become
again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were riut for such
families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and
fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast
for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each
growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is
laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or
sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch
on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more
genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the land-
scape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its
vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable
to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged
thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they
attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those
gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth, — how rarely we mount! Methinks we
might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree,
at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was
a tall white-pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well
pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new moun-
tains in the horizon which I had never seen before, — so much
more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about

630 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the foot of the tree for three-score years and ten, and yet I cer-
tainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I dis-
covered around me, — it was near the end of June, — on the
ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate
red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine
looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the
topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked
the streets, — for it was court-week, — and the farmers and
lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one
had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star
dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works
on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more
visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute
blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men^s
heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that
are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed
their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every
summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red chil-
dren as of her white ones ; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in
the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He
is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing
life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the
cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated.
That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty
and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His
philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There
is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the
gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern ; he
has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is
to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expres-
sion of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the
world, — healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new foun-
tain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where

WALKING 63^

he lives no fugitivt,' slave laws are passed. Who has not be-
trayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to
laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morn-
ing joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful still-
ness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a
watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow
far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at
any rate,” — and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was
walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the
sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached
? clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest
morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the
trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-
oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over
the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its
beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a
moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that
nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow.
When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon,
never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and
ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure
the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is
visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on
cities, and perchance as it has never set before, — where there
is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it,
or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is
some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh,
j'.ist beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying
stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the
withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I

632 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a
ripple or a murmur to it* The west side of every wood and
rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the
sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us
home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun
shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall per-
chance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our
whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene
and golden as on a bankside in autunm.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

{This paper was printed in 1849 in the first nunu
her of Aesthetic Papers, edited by Elizabeth Pea^
body. The entire essay is included here.]

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I HEAKTiLY acocpt the motto, — ^“That government is best
which governs least ; ” and I should like to see it acted up to
more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally
amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That governmenl
is best which governs not at all;” and when men are pre-
pared for it, that will be the kind of government which they
will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most
governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes,
inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against
a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and de-
serve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a stand-
ing government. The standing army is only an arm of the
standing government. The government itself, which is only
the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will,
is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people
can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the
work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing
government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would
not have consented to this measure.

This American government, — what is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unim-
paired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its in-
tegrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living
man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of
wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less
necessary for this; for the people must have some compli-
cated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that
idea of government which they have. Governments show
thus bow successfully men can be imposed on, even impost*

63S

636 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we
must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered
any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of
its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle
the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the
American people has done all that has been accomplished;
and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had
not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient
by which men would fain succeed in letting one another
alone ; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the
governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if
they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to
bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually
putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men
wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their
intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished
with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the
railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those
who call themselves no government men, I ask for, not at
once no government, but at once a better government. Lei
every man make known what kind of government would
command his respect, and that will be one step toward ob-
taining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once
in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and
for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are
most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest
to the minority, but because they are physically the strong-
est. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases
cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand
it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not
virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which
majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of
expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a mo-
ment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 637

legisiatotr Why has every man a conscience, then? I think
that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is
not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as
for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to as
sume is to do at any time what I think right. It is trul>
enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a
corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a
conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and,
by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are
daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural
result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file
of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-
monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and
dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their com-
mon sense and consciences, which makes it very steep march-
ing indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They
have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they
are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what
are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and maga-
gines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as
an American government can make, or such as it can mak(
a man with its black arts, — a mere shadow and reminiscence
of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already,
as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accom-
paniments, though it may be, —

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainiy,
but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing
army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus.
etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the

638 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves
on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men
can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as
well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or
a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as
horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly
esteemed good citizens. Others — as most legislators, politi-
cians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders — serve the state
chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral
distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without
intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs,
reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with
their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most
part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise
man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be
^‘clay,” and ‘'stop a hole to keep the wind away/^ but leave
that office to his dust at least: —

‘T am too high-born to be propertied,

To be a secondary at control,

Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears
to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself par-
(;ially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American
government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without dis-
grace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recog-
nize that political organization as my government which is
the slaveys government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution ; that is, the right
to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when
its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But
almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the
case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 639

me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain
foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable
that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without
them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this
does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it
is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction
comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are
organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.
In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves,
and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a
foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it
is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the
country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading
army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions,
in his chapter on the ^‘Duty of Submission to Civil Govern-
ment,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he
proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole
society requires it, that is, so long as the established govern-
ment cannot be resisted or changed without public incon-
veniency, it is the will of God that the established govern-
ment be obeyed, and no longer, . . . This principle being
admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance
is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the dangei
and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and
expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every
man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have
contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency
does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual,
must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested
a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though
I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be incon-
venient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall
los« it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to makf^

640 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a

people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any
one think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at
the present crisis?

‘^A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,

To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.’^

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massa-
chusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South,
but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are
more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in
humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and
to Mexico, cost what it may, I quarrel not with far-off foes,
but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do
the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter
would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass
of men are unprepared ; but improvement is slow, because the
few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is
not so important that many should be as good as you, as that
there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will
leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in
opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect
do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves
children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their
hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to
do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of free-
dom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-
current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after din-
ner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the
price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesi-
tate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition ; but they
do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well dis-
posed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer
have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 641

feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes
by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of
virtue to one virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the
real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian
of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon,
with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong,
with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.
The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, per-
chance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that
that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the ma-
jority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of ex-
pediency. Even voting for the right is daing nothing for it.
It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should
prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of
chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the ma-
jority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of
men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition
of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery,
or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by
their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can
hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom
by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere,
for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up
chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession;
but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and re-
spectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not
have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless?
Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there
not many individuals in the country who do not attend con-
ventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called,
has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his
country, when his country has more reason to despair of him.
He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as
the only available one, thus proving that he is himself avails

642 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
able for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no
more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling
native, who may have been bought. O for a man who is a
marij and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which
you cannot pass your hand through ! Our statistics are at fault:
the population has been returned too large. How many men
are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly
one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle
here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow, — one
who may be known by the development of his organ of gre-
gariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-
reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the
world, is to see that the Almshouses are in good repair; and,
before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect
a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may
be; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the
Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him
decently.

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote
himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous
wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage
him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and,
if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his
support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contempla-
tions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sit-
ting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first,
that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross in-
consistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen
say, ‘T should like to have them order me out to help put down
an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; — see if
I would go;” and yet these very men have each, directly by
their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money,
furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses
to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sus-
tain the unjust government which makes the war; is ap-
plauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 643

and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree
that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that
degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the
name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last
to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the
first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it
becomes, as it were, z/wmoral, and not quite unnecessary to
that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most
disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which
the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are
most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the
character and measures of a government, yield to it their
allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious
supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to
reform. Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union,
to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they
not dissolve it themselves, — the union between themselves
and the state, — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?
Do not they stand in the same relation to the state that the
state does to the Union? And have not the same reasons pre-
vented the state from resisting the Union which have pre-
vented them from resisting the state?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely,
and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is
that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar
by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that
you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even
with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take
effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that
you are never cheated again. Action from principle, the per-
ception and the performance of right, changes things and
relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist
wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and
churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the mdividual^
separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

644 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we
have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men
generally, under such a government as this, think that they
ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter

them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy
would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the govern-
ment itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it
worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for
reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does
it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage
its citizens to he on the alert to point out its faults, and do
better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify
Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pro-
nounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of
its authority was the only offense never contemplated by gov-
ernment ; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable
and proportionate penalty? If a man who has no property
refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the state, he is put
in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and
determined only by the discretion of those who placed him
there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from
the state, he is soon permitted to go at large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the ma-
chine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear
smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injus-
tice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively
for itself, then perhaps 3 "ou may consider whether the remedy
will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature
that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,

then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction
to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate,
that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 645

much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs
to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this
a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A
man has not everything to do, but something; and because he
cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do
something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the
Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to peti-
tion me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should
I do then? But in this case the state has provided no way: its
very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and
stubborn and unconciliatory ; but it is to treat with the utmost
kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate
or deserves it. So is all change for the better, like birth and
death, which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their sup-
port, both in person and property, from the government of
Massachusetts and not wait till they constitute a majority
of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.
I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, with-
out waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right
than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the
state government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no
more — in the person of its tax-gatherer ; this is the only mode
in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it
then says distinctly. Recognize me; and the simplest, most
effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indis-
pensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing
your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then.
My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to
deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parch-
ment that I quarrel, — ^and he has voluntarily chosen to be an
agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what
he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man,
until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, hig

646 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-
disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and
see if he can, get over this obstruction to his neighborliness
without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech cor-
responding with his action. I know this well, that if one
thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, —
if ten honest men only, — ay, if one honest man, in this State
of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to
withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the
county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in
America. For it matters not how small the beginning may
seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we
love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform
keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one
man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State’s ambassador, who
will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human
rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened
with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner
of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the
sin of slavery upon her sister, — though at present she can
discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a
quarrel with her, — the Legislature would not wholly waive the
subject the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day,
the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her
freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put
out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have
already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that
the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and
the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find
them ; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground,
where the State places those who are not with her, but against
her,-r~the only bouse, in a slave State in which a free man can
abide with honor. If any think that their influence would
be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 647

State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls,
they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error,
nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can com-
bat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your
whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to
the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresisti-
ble when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to
keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men
were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be
a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and
enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any
such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public
officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘^But what shall I do?” my
answer is, ^Tf you really wish to do anything, resign your
office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the
officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accom-
plished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a
sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through
this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out,
and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing
now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender,
rather than the seizure of his goods, — though both will serve
the same purpose, — because they who assert the purest right,
and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, com-
monly have not spent much time in accumulating property.
To such the State renders comparatively small service, and
a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if
they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands.
If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money,
the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the
rich man — not to make any invidious comparison — is always
sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely

648 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes
between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him;
and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to
rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to
answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard
but superfluous one, how to Spend it. Thus his moral ground
is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are
diminished in proportion as what are called the “means’^
are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture
when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes
which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the
Herodians according to their condition. ‘^Show me the tribute-
money,” said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket;
—if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it and
v^rhich he has made current and valuable, that is, i] you are
men of the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s
government, then pay him back some of his own when he de-
mands it. Render therefore to C^sar that which is Caesar's,
and to God those things which are God’s,” — ^leaving them no
wiser than before as to which was which ; for they did not wish
to know.

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I per-
ceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and
seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public
tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they
cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and
they dread the consequences to their property and families of
disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like to
think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if
I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill,
it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me
and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it im-
possible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time com-
fortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while
to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You
must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 649

eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend
upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and
not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even,
if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish gov-
ernment. Confucius said: ‘Tf a state is governed by the prin-
ciples of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame;
if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches
and honors are the subjects of shame.’^ No: until I want the
protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some
distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or
until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by
peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massa-
chusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me
less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the
State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth
less in that case.

Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church,
and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support
of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but
never I myself. ^Tay,’^ it said, ‘^or be locked up in the jail.’’
I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit
to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed
to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for
I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself
by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum
should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back
its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request
of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such state*
ment as this in writing: — “Know all men by these presents,
that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a mem-
ber of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”
This I gave to the town clerk ; and he has it. The State, hav-
ing thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a mem-
ber of that church, has never made a like demand on me
since; though it said that it must adhere to its original pre-
sumption that time. If I had known how to name them, X

650 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
should then have signed off in detail from all the societies
vyrhich I never signed on to; but I did not know where to
find a complete list.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a
jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood con-
sidering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the
door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating
which strained the light, I could not help being struck with
the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I
were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I
wondered that it should have concluded at length that this
was the bes^- use it could put me to, and had never thought
to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there
was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there
was a still more difficult one to climb or break through be-
fore they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a
moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of
stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had
paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me,
but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat
and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of
that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously
they locked the door on my meditations, which followed
them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really
all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had
resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot
come at some person against whom they have a spite, will
abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it
was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that
it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my
remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense,
intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not
armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physi-
cal strength. T was not born to be forced. I will breathe after

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 6St

my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force
has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher
law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not
hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses
of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a
government which says to me, ^'Your money or your life,’’
why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be
in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help
that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the
while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the success-
ful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of
the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut
fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make wa>
for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and
grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, over-
shadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live accord-
ing to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.
The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and
the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer
said, ^^Come, boys, it is time to lock up;’’ and so they dis-
persed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into
the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me
by the jailer as ‘^a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” When
the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat,
and how he managed matters there. The rooms were white-
washed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest,
most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment
in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from,
and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked
him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an
honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, I believe he
was. ‘Why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but
I never did it.” As near as I could discover, he had prob-
ably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his
pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation

652 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of being a clever man, had been there some three months wait-
ing for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much
longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since
he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well
treated.

He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that
if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to
look out the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were
left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken
out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the his-
tory of the various occupants of that room; for I found that
even here there was a history and a gossip which never circu-
lated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only
house in the town where verses are composed, which are
afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I
was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed
by some young men who had been detected in an attempt
to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear
I should never see him again; but at length he showed me
which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.

It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never
expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to
me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor
the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the
windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see
my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our
Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of
knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices
of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involun-
tary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said
in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn, — a. wholly new and
rare experience to me. It wa5 a closer view of my native town.
I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions be-
fore. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire
town. T bevan to comorehend what its inhabitants were about.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 653

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole
in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and
holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron
spoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was gree ^
enough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade
seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or
dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neigh-
boring field, whither he went every day, and would not be
back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that hr
doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison, — for some one interfered, and
paid that tax, — I did not perceive that great changes had
taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in
a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man ; and
yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, — the town,
and State, and country, — ^greater than any that mere time
could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I
lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived
could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their
friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not
greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race
from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the China-
men and Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity
they ran no risks, not even to their property; that after
all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he
had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance
and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight
though useless path from time to time, to save their souls.
This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe
that many of them are not aware that they have such an
institution as the jail in their village.

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor
debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him,
looking through their fingers, which were crossed tr represent
the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors
did not thus salute me, but first look^ at me, and the- at

654 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
one another, as if I had returned from a long journey.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get
a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morn-
ing, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, ha>ring put on my
mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient
to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour, —
for the horse was soon tackled, — was in the midst of a huckle-
berry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then
the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.’’

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I
am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being
a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my
part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no par-
ticular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply
wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand
aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course
of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to
shoot with, — the dollar is innocent, — but I am concerned to
trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare
war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make
what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in
such cases.

If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sym-
pathy with the State, they do but what they have already
done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a
greater extent than the State requires. If they pay the tax
from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his
property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have
not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings
interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too
much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biased
by obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 655

Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and
to the hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are
only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why
give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not
inclined to? But I think again. This is no reason why I should
do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of
a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When
many millions of men, without heat, without ill will, without
personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings
only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of re-
tracting or altering their present demand, and without the
possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why
expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not
resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obsti-
nately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities.
You do not put your head into the fire. But just in propor-
tion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly
a human force, and consider that I have relations to those
millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute
or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and
instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, sec-
ondly, from them to themselves. But if I put my head delib-
erately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker
of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince
myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they
are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in
some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what
they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and
fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they
are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is
this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or
natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I
cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks
and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not

656 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself
up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even
an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but
too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to
suspect myself on this head ; and each year, as the tax-gath-
erer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and
position of the general and State governments, and the spirit
Qi the people, to discover a pretext for conformity.

“We must affect our country as our parents.

And if at any time we alienate

Our love or industry from doing it honor.

We must respect effects and teach the soul
Matter of conscience and religion,

And not desire of rule or benefit.’^

I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work
of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no better a
patriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower point
of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good ; the
law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and
this American government are, in many respects, very admira-
ble, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many
have described them; but seen from a point of view a little
higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a
higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or
that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and
T shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not
many moments that I live under a government, even in this
world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-
free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be
to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt
him.

I know that most men think differently from myself ; but
thost. whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 6S)

these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. States'
men and legislators, standing so completely within the insti-
tution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of
moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They
may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and
have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems,
for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and use-
fulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont
to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expedi-
ency, Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot
speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those
legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the exist-
ing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate
for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know of
those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would
soon reveal the limits of his mind’s range and hospitality.
Yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers,
and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in
general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words,
and we thank Heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always
strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his quality is
not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not Truth,
but consistency or a consistent expediency. Truth is always
in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to re-
veal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well
deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of
the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by
him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower.
His leaders are the men of ’87. ‘T have never made an effort,”
he says, ‘‘and never propose to make an effort; I have never
countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an ef-
fort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which
the various States came into the Union.” Still thinking of the
sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says,
“Because it was a part of the original compact, — ^let it stand.”
Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, hf h un-

658 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
able to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and
behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intel-
lect, — what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in
America to-day with regard to slavery, — but ventures, or
is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the follow-
ing, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private
man, — from which what new and singular code of social duties
might be inferred? ‘‘The manner,’’ says he, “in which the gov-
ernments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate
it is for their own consideration, under their responsibility
to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, human-
ity, and justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere,
springing from a feeling of humanity, or other cause, have
nothing whatever to do with it. They have never received any
encouragement from me, and they never will.” ^

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have
traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by
the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with
reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes
trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once
more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-
head.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in
America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are
orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but
the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is
capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We
love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which
it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators
have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and
of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have
no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of tax-
ation and finance, commerce and manufactures and agri-
culture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators

^ These extracts have been inserted since the lecture was read.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE 659

in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable
experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America
would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eight-
een hundred years, though perchance I have no right to
say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the
legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail
himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legisla-
tion?

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to
submit to^ — for I will cheerfully obey those who know and
can do better than I, and in many things even those who
neither know nor can do so well, — is still an impure one: to
be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the
governed. It can have no pure right over my person and prop-
erty but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute
to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democ-
racy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard
the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy,
such as we know it, the last improvement possible in govern-
ment? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recog-
nizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be
a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to
recognize the individual as a higher and independent power,
from which all its own power and authority are derived, and
treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a
State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat
the individual with respect as a neighbor ; which even would
not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to
live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it,
who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A
State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop
off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still
more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined,
but not yet anywhere seen.

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS

[This is an address Thoreau delivered at the AntU
Slavery Convention at Framingham, Mass,, July 4,
1854. It was printed in the Liberator for July 21^
1854. The entire address follows.]

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS

I LATELY attended a meeting of the citizens of Concord, ex--
pecting, as one among many, to speak on the subject of slav-
ery in Massachusetts; but I was surprised and disappointed
to find that what had called my townsmen together was the
destiny of Nebraska, and not of Massachusetts, and that what
I had to say would be entirely out of order. I had thought
that the house was on fire, and not the prairie; but though
several of the citizens of Massachusetts are now in prison
for attempting to rescue a slave from her own clutches, not
one of the speakers at that meeting expressed regret for it,
not one even referred to it. It was only the disposition of some
wild lands a thousand miles off which appeared to concern
them. The inhabitants of Concord are not prepared to stand
by one of their own bridges, but talk only of taking up a po-
sition on the highlands beyond the Yellowstone River. Our
Buttricks and Davises and Hosmers are retreating thither,
and I fear that they will leave no Lexington Common between
them and the enemy. There is not one slave in Nebraska;
there are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts.

They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now
and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures
and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement
indefinitely, and meanwhile the debt accumulates. Though the
Fugitive Slave Law had not been the subject of discussion on
that occasion, it was at length faintly resolved by my towns-
men, at an adjourned meeting, as I learn, that the compromise
compact of 1820 having been repudiated by one of the parties,
‘^Therefore, . . . the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 must be re-
pealed. But this is not the reason why an iniquitous law

663

664 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
should be repealed. The fact which the politician faces is
merely that there is less honor among thieves than was sup-
posed, and not the fact that they are thieves.

As I had no opportunity to express my thoughts at that
meeting, will you allow me to do so here?

Again it happens that the Boston Court-House is full of
armed men, holding prisoner and trying a man, to find out
if he is not really a slave. Does any one think that justice or
God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision? For him to sit there decid-
ing still, when this question is already decided from eternity
to eternity, and the unlettered slave himself and the multitude
around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is
simply to make himself ridiculous. We may be tempted to ask
from v/hom he received his commission, and who he is that re-
ceived it ; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents
are ^o him of authority. Such an arbiter’s very existence is an
impertinence. We do not ask him to make up his mind, but
to make up his pack.

I listen to hear the voice of a Governor, Commander-in-
Chief of the forces of Massachusetts. I hear only the creak-
ing of crickets and the hum of insects which now fill the sum-
mer air. The Governor’s exploit is to review the troops on
muster days. I have seen him on horseback, with his hat off,
listening to a chaplain’s prayer. It chances that that is all I
have ever seen of a Governor. I think that I could manage
to get along without one. If he is not of the least use to pre-
vent my being kidnapped, pray of what important use is he
likely to be to me? When freedom is most endangered, he
dwells in the deepest obscurity. A distinguished clergyman
told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because
it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would
recommend to him the profession of a Governor.

Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I
said to myself. There is such an officer, if not such a man, as
the Governor of Massachusetts, — ^what has he been about the
last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 665
the fence during this moral earthquake? It seemed to me that
no keener satire could have been aimed at, no more cutting
insult have been offered to that man, than just what hap-
pened, — the absence of all inquiry after him in that crisis.
The worst and the most I chance to know of him is that he
did not improve that opportunity to make himself known,
and worthily known. He could at least have resigned himself
into fame. It appeared to be forgotten that there was such a
man or such an office. Yet no doubt he was endeavoring to
fill the gubernatorial chair all the while. He was no Governor
of mine. He did not govern me.

But at last, in the present case, the Governor was heard
from. After he and the United States government had per-
fectly succeeded in robbing a poor innocent black man of his
liberty for life, and, as far as they could, of his Creator’s like-
ness in his breast, he made a speech to his accomplices, at a
congratulatory supper!

I have read a recent law of this State, making it penal for
any officer of the ^‘Commonwealth” to “detain or aid in the
. . . detention,” anywhere within its limits, “of any person,
for the reason that he is claimed as a fugitive slave.” Also, it
was a matter of notoriety that a writ of replevin to take the
fugitive out of the custody of the United States Marshal could
not be served for want of sufficient force to aid the officer.

I had thought that the Governor was, in some sense, the
executive officer of the State; that it was his business, as a
Governor, to see that the laws of the State were executed;
while, as a man, he took care that he did not, by so doing,
break the laws of humanity; but when there is any special
important use for him, he is useless, or worse than use-
less, and permits the laws of the State to go unexecuted.
Perhaps I do not know what are the duties of a Governor;
but if to be a Governor requires to subject one’s self to so
much ignominy without remedy, if it is to put a restraint upon
my manhood, I shall take care never to be Governor of Massa-
chusetts. I have not read far in the statutes of this Common-

666 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
wealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say
what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.
What I am concerned to know is, that that man^s influence
and authority were on the side of the slaveholder, and not of
the slave, — of the guilty, and not of the innocent, — of injus-
tice, and not of justice. I never saw him of whom I speak;
indeed, I did not know that he was Governor until this event
occurred. I heard of him and Anthony Burns at the same
time, and thus, undoubtedly, most will hear of him. So far
am I from being governed by him. I do not mean that it was
anything to his discredit that I had not heard of him, only
that I heard what I did. The worst I shall say of him is, that
he proved no better than the majority of his constituents
would be likely to prove. In my opinion, he was not equal to
the occasion.

The whole military force of the State is at the service of a
Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch
a man whom he calls his property; but noi a soldier is offered
to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped 1 Is
this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for
these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely
to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?

These very nights I heard the sound of a drum in our
streets. There were men training still; and for what? I could
with an effort pardon the cockerels of Concord for crow-
ing still, for they, perchance, had not been beaten that morn-
ing; but I could not excuse this rub-a-dub of the “trainers.^^
The slave was carried back by exactly such as these; i.e., by
the soldier, of whom the best you can say in this connection
is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a painted coat.

Three years ago, also, just a week after the authorities of
Boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man;
and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the
inhabitants of Concord caused the bells to be rung and the
cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty, — and the cour^
age and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 667,
bridge. As if those three millions had fought for the right to
be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others.
Nowadays, men wear a foohs-cap, and call it a liberty-cap. I
do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a
whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it
to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty.
So some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire.
That was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound
of the bells died away, their liberty died away also ; when the
powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the
smoke.

The joke could be no broader if the inmates of the prisons
were to subscribe for all the powder to be used in such salutes,
and hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while
they enjoyed it through the grating.

This is what I thought about my neighbors.

Every humane and intelligent inhabitant of Concord, when
he or she heard those bells and those cannons, thought not
with pride of the events of the 19th of April, 1775, but with
shame of the events of the 12th of April, 1851. But now we
have half buried that old shame under a new one.

Massachusetts sat waiting Mr. Loring’s decision, as if it
could in any way affect her own criminality. Her crime, the
most conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was permitting him
to be the umpire in such a case. It was really the trial of
Massachusetts. Every moment that she hesitated to set this
man free, every moment that she now hesitates to atone for
her crime, she is convicted. The Commissioner on her case is
God; not Edward G. God, but simple God.

I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the*
human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever
commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest indi-
vidual without having to pay the penalty for.it. A govern-
ment which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in if,
will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

Much has been said about American slavery, but I think

668 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. If I were seri-
ously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages,
I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my
proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they
would think that I proposed something much worse than Con-
gress had ever done. But if any of them will tell me that to
make a man into a sausage would be much worse,— would be
any worse, — than to make him into a slave,— than it was to
enact the Fugitive Slave Law, — I will accuse him of foolish-
ness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction with-
out a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as
the other.

I hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot.
Why, one need not go out of his way to do that. This law rises
not to the level of the head or the reason ; its natural habitat
is in the dirt. It was born and bred, and has its life, only in
the dust and mire, on a level with the feet ; and he who walks
with freedom, and does not with Hindoo mercy avoid treading
on every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so
trample it under foot, — and Webster, its maker, with it, like
the dirt-bug and its ball.

Recent events will be valuable as a criticism on the admin-
istration of justice in our midst, or, rather, as showing what
are the true resources of justice in any community. It has
come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the
slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his
fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be de-
cided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded
in such a case. The judge may decide this way or that; it is
a kind of accident, at best. It is evident that he is not a com-
petent authority in so important a case. It is no time, then, to
be judging according to his precedents, but to establish a
precedent for the future. I would much rather trust to the
sentiment of the people. In their vote you would get some-
thing of some value, at least, however small; but in the other

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 66‘>
case, only the trammeled judgment of an individual, of no
significance, be it which way it might.

It is to some extent fatal to the courts, when the people are
compelled to go behind them. I do not wish to believe that the
courts were made for fair weather, and for very civil cases
merely; but think of leaving it to any court in the land to de-
cide whether more than three millions of people, in this case a
sixth part of a nation, have a right to be freemen or not! But
it has been left to the courts of justice, so called, — to the
Supreme Court of the land, — ^and, as you all know, recog
nizing no authority but the Constitution, it has decided that
the three millions are and shall continue to be slaves. Such
judges as these are merely the inspectors of a pick-lock and
murderer’s tools, to tell him whether they are in working
order or not, and there they think that their responsibility
ends. There was a prior case on the docket, which they, as
judges appointed by God, had no right to skip; which having
been justly settled, they would have been saved from this
humiliation. It was the case of the murderer himself.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have
got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and
order who observe the law when the government breaks it.

Among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate
of a man furthest into eternity is not he who merely pro-
nounces the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be,
who, from a love of truth, and unprejudiced by any custom
or enactment of men, utters a true opinion or sentence con-
cerning him. He it is that sentences him. Whoever can discern
truth has received his commission from a higher source than
the chiefest justice in the world who can discern only law.
He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that
it should be necessary to state such simple truths!

I am more and more convinced that, with reference to
any public question, it is more important to know what the
country thinks of it than what the city thinks. The city does
not think much. On any moral question, I would rather have

670 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the opinion of Boxboro^ than of Boston and New York put
together. When the former speaks, I feel as if somebody had
spoken, as if humanity was yet, and a reasonable being had
asserted its rights, — as if some unprejudiced men among the
country’s hills had at length turned their attention to the sub
ject, and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation
of the race. When, in some obscure country town, the farmers
come together to a special town-meeting, to express their
opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think,
is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever
assembled in the United States.

It is evident that there are, in this Commonwealth at least,
two parties, becoming more and more distinct, — the party
of the city, and the party of the country. I know that the
country is mean enough, but I am glad to believe that there
is a slight difference in her favor. But as yet she has few, if
any organs, through which to express herself. The editorials
fvhich she reads, like the news, come from the seaboard. Let
us, the inhabitants of the country, cultivate self-respect. Let
us not send to the city for aught more essential than our
broadcloths and groceries ; or, if we read the opinions of the
city, let us entertain opinions of our own.

Among measures to be adopted, I would suggest to make
as earnest and vigorous an assault on the press as has already
been made, and with effect, on the church. The church has
much improved within a few years ; but the press is, almost
without exception, corrupt. I believe that in this country the
press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than
the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious peo-
ple, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for
the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper. At any meeting
of politicians, — like that at Concord the other evening, for
instance, — how impertinent it would be to quote from the
Bible! how pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the
Constitution I The newspaper is a Bible which we read every
morning and every afternoon; standing and sitting, riding

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 671
and walking. It is a Bible which every man carries in his
pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the
mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispers-
ing. It is, in short, the only book which America has printed^
and which America reads. So wide is its influence. The editor
is a preacher whom you voluntarily support. Your tax is com-
monly one cent daily, and it costs nothing for pew hire. But
how many of these preachers preach the truth? I repeat the
testimony of many an intelligent foreigner, as well as my own
convictions, when I say, that probably no country was ever
ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble ex-
ceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this coun-
try. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and ap-
pealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the
people who read them are in the condition of the dog that
returns to his vomit.

The Llbe^rator and the Commonwealth were the only papers
in Boston, as far as I know, which made themselves heard in
condemnation of the cowardice and meanness of the authori-
ties of that city, as exhibited in ’5 1. The other journals, almost
without exception, by their manner of referring to and speak-
ing of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the carrying back of the
slave Sims, insulted the common sense of the country, at least.
And, for the most part, they did this, one would say, because
they thought so to secure the approbation of their patrons,
not being aware that a sounder sentiment prevailed to any ex-
tent in the heart of the Commonwealth. I am told that some
of them have improved of late; but they are still eminently
time-serving. Such is the character they have won.

But, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily
reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recre-
ant priest. The free men of New England have only to refrain
from purchasing and reading these sheets, have only to with-
hold their cents, to kill a score of them at once. One whom
I respect told me that he purchased Mitchell’s Citizen in the
cars, and then threw it out the window. But would not his con-*

612 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
tempt have been more fatally expressed if he had not bought
it?

Are they Americans? are they New Englanders? are they
inhabitants of Lexington and Concord and Framingham, who
read and support the Boston Post^ Mail, Journal, Advertiser,
Courier, and Times? Are these the Flags of our Union? I am
not a newspaper reader, and may omit to name the worst.

Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some
of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their con-
duct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime? I do
not know whether the Boston Herald is still in existence, but
I remember to have seen it about the streets when Sims was
carried off. Did it not act its part well, — serve its master faith-
fully 1 How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a
man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremi-
ties in the place of the head he has? than make his head his
ower extremity? When I have taken up this paper with my
uffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through
^ery column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked
,ut of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gam-
3 ling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with
^he gospel of the Merchants' Exchange.

The majority of the men of the North, and of the South
and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote,
they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity;
but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and
hung for loving liberty, while — I might here insert all that
slavery implies and is — it is the mismanagement of wood and
iron and stone and gold which concerns them. Do what you
will, O Government, with my wife and children, my mother
and brother, my father and sister, I will obey your commands
to the letter. It will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you
deliver them to overseers to be hunted by hounds or to be
whipped to death; but, nevertheless, I will peaceably pursue
my chosen calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day,
when I have put on mourning for them dead , I shall have per-

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 675
suaded you to relent. Such is the attitude, such are the words
of Massachusetts.

Rather than do thus, I need not say what match I would
touch, what system endeavor to blow up; but as I love my
life, I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll
from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men
first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No
matter how valuable law may be to protect your property,
even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you
and humanity together.

I am sorry to say that I doubt if there is a judge in Massa-
chusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living
innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence
under a law which is merely contrary to the law of God. I am
compelled to see that they put themselves, or rather are by
character, in this respect, exactly on a level with the marine
who discharges his musket in any direction he is ordered to.
They are just as much tools, and as little men. Certainly, they
are not the more to be respected, because their master en-
slaves their understandings and consciences, instead of their
bodies.

The judges and lawyers, — simply as such, I mean, — ^and
all men of expediency, try this case by a very low and in-
competent standard. They consider, not whether the Fugitive
Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitu-
tional, Is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitu-
tional, or iniquity? In important moral and vital questions,
like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is con-
stitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not.
They persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and
not the servants of humanity. The question is, not whether
you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter
into an agreement to serve the Devil, and that service is not
accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once
and at last, serve God, — in spite of your own past recreancy,

674 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
or that of your ancestor, — ^by obeying that eternal and only
just Constitution, which He, and not any Jefferson or
Adams, has written in your being.

The amount of it is, if the majority vote the Devil to be
God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, — and
obey the successful candidate, trusting that, some time or
other, by some Speaker’s casting-vote, perhaps, they may
reinstate God. This is the highest principle I can get out or
invent for my neighbors. These men act as if they believed
that they could safely slide down a hill a little way, — or a
good way, — and would surely come to a place, by and by,
where they could begin to slide up again. This is expediency,
or choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles
to the feet, that is, a downhill one. But there is no such thing
as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of ^‘expedi-
ency.” There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals the
only sliders are backsliders.

Thus we steadily worship Mammon, both school and state
and church, and on the seventh day curse God with a tinta-
mar from one end of the Union to the other.

Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality, —
that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely
what is expedient? chooses the available candidate, — who is
invariably the Devil, — and what right have his constituents
to be surprised, because the Devil does not behave like an
angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of
probity, — who recognize a higher law than the Constitution,
or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does
not depend on how you vote at the polls,- “the worst man is
as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on
what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year,
but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into
the street every morning.

What should concern Massachusetts is not the Nebraska
Bill, nor the Fugitive Slave Bill, but her own slaveholding
and servility. Let the State dissolve hei union with the slave-

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 673
holder. She may wriggle and hesitate, and ask leave to read
the Constitution once more; but she can find no respectable
law or precedent which sanctions the continuance of such a
union for an instant.

Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his union with
her, as long as she delays to do her duty.

The events of the past month teach me to distrust Fame.
I see that she does not finely discriminate, but coarsely hur-
rahs. She considers not the simple heroism of an action, but
only as it is connected with its apparent consequences. She
praises till she is hoarse the easy exploit of the Boston tea
party, but will be comparatively silent about the braver and
more disinterestedly heroic attack on the Boston Court-House,
simply because it was unsuccessful!

Covered with disgrace, the State has sat down coolly to
try for their lives and liberties the men who attempted to do
its duty for it. And this is called justice! They who have shown
that they can behave particularly well may perchance be put
under bonds for their good behavior. They whom truth re-
quires at present to plead guilty are, of all the inhabitants of
the State, preeminently innocent. While the Governor, and
the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are
at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

Only they are guiltless who commit the crime of contempt
of such a court. It behooves every man to see that his influ-
ence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their
own characters. My sympathies in this case are wholly with
the accused, and wholly against their accusers and judges.
Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and dis-
cordant. The judge still sits grinding at his organ, but it
yields no music, and we hear only the sound of the handle.
He believes that all the music resides in the handle, and the
crowd toss him their coppers the same as before.

Do you suppose that that Massachusetts which is now doing
these things, — ^which hesitates to crown these men, some of
whose lawyers, and even judges, perchance, may be driven

<576 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to take refuge in some poor quibble, that they may not wholly
outrage their instinctive sense of justice,— do you suppose
that she is anything but base and servile? that she is the
champion of liberty?

Show me a free state, and a court truly of justice, and I
will fight for them, if need be; but show me Massachusetts,
and I refuse her my allegiance, and express contempt for her
courts.

The effect of a good government is to make life more valu-
able, — of a bad one, to make it less valuable. We can afford
that railroad and all merely material stock should lose some
of its value, for that only compels us to live more simply
and economically; but suppose that the value of life itself
should be diminished! How can we make a less demand on
man and nature, how live more economically in respect to vir-
tue and all noble qualities, than we do? I have lived for the
last month — and I think that every man in Massachusetts
capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar
experience — with the sense of having suffered a vast and in-
definite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last
it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had
never respected the government near to which I lived, but I
had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, mind-
ing my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and
worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their
attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth
many per cent, less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent
back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt
before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed some-
where only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot per-
suade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The site
of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me
morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as
Milton describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell
more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel
curious to see it. Life itself being worth lesS; all things with

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 671
it, which minister to it, are worth less. Suppose you have a
small library, with pictures to adorn the walls, — a garden laid
out around, — and contemplate scientih' id literary pursuits
and discover all at once that your villa, with all its contents^
is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace has a clovei.
foot and a forked tail, — do not these things suddenly lose their
value in your eyes?

I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered
with my lawful business. It has not only interrupted me in
my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it
has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward
path, on which he had trusted soon to leave Court Street far
behind. What right had it to remind me of Court Street? I
have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if
nothing had happened. I say to myself, “Unfortunates! they
have not heard the news.” I am surprised that the man whom
I just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake
his newly bought cows running away, — since all property is
insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be
taken away from him when he gets them. Fool! does he not
know that his seed-corn is worth less this year, — that all be-
neficent harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell? No
prudent man will build a stone house under these circum-
stances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it re-
quires a long time to accomplish. Art is as long as ever, but
life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper
pursuits. It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our
inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight
for them.

I walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the
beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see
our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we
go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both
the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remem-

678 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
brance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder
to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.

But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-
lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the
emblem of purity. It bursts up so pure and fair to the eye,
and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and
sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and
muck of earth. I think I have plucked the first one that has
opened for a mile. What confirmation of our hopes is in the
fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the
world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and
want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of
laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail,
and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as
sweet. Such is the odor which the plant emits. If Nature can
compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still
young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired,
and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to per-
ceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner
to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the
fragrance of the water-lily. It is not a Nymphxa Douglasii.
In it, the sweet, and pure, and innocent are wholly sundered
from the obscene and baleful. I do not scent in this the time-
serving irresolution of a Massachusetts Governor, nor of a
Boston Mayor. So behave that the odor of your actions may
enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when
we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how in-
consistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form
of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had
not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul
slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of
humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the
purity and courage which are immortal.

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented
flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have
no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive

SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS 679
to all healthy nostrils. We do not complain that they livt^
but that they do not get buried. Let the living bury them:
even they are good for manure.

A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

[This was an address delivered before the citizens of
Concord on October 30, 1859, at a meeting sum-
moned by Thoreau while John Brown was still in
jail. The entire address f allows, \

A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

I TRUST that you will pardon me for being here. I do not wish
to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little
as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to cor-
rect the tone and statements of the newspapers, and of my
countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions.
It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our
sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions,
and that is what I now propose to do.

First, as to his history. I will endeavor to omit, as much as
possible, what you have already read. I need not describe his
person to you, for probably most of you have seen and will
not soon forget him. I am told that his grandfather, John
Brown, was an officer in the Revolution; that he himself was
born in Connecticut about the beginning of this century, but
early went with his father to Ohio. I heard him say that his
father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there,
in the war of 1 8 1 2 ; that he accompanied him to the camp, and
assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of mili-
tary life, — more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier ; for
he v/as often present at the councils of the officers. Especially,
he learned by experience how armies are supplied and main-
tained in the field, — a work which, he observed, requires at
least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle.
He said that few persons had any conception of the cost,
even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet In war. He
saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a military life;
indeed, to excite in him a great abhorrence of it; so much
so, that though he was tempted by the offer of some petty
office in the army, when he was about eighteen, he not only

683

684 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
declined that, but he also refused to train when warned, and
was fined for it. He then resolved that he would never have
anything to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty.

When the troubles in Kansas began, he sent several of his
sons thither to strengthen the party of the Free State men,
fitting them out with such weapons as he had; telling them
that if the troubles should increase, and there should be need
of him, he would follow, to assist them with his hand and
counsel. This, as you all know, he soon after did ; and it was
through his agency, far more than any other’s, that Kansas
was made free.

For a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he
was engaged in wool-growing, and he went to Europe as an
agent about that business. There, as everywhere, he had his
eyes about him, and made many original observations. He
said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of England was so
rich, and that of Germany (I think it was) so poor, and he
thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it.
It was because in England the peasantry live on the soil
which they cultivate, but in Germany they are gathered into
villages at night. It is a pity that he did not make a book of
his observations.

I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his re-
spect for the Constitution, and his faith in the permanence
of this Union. Slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to
these, and he was its determined foe.

He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man
of great common sense, deliberate and practical as that class
is, and tenfold more so. He was like the best of those who
stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on
Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than
any that I have chanced to hear of as there. It was no aboli-
tion lecturer that converted him. Ethan Allen and Stark, with
whom he may in some respects be compared, were rangers in
a lower and less important field. They could bravely face
their country's foes, but he had the courage to face his coun-

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 685
try herself when she was in the wrong. A Western writer says,
to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was
concealed under a ''rural exterior;'' as if, in that prairie land,
a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen’s dress only.

He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma
Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there
furnished. As he phrased it, "I know no more of grammar than
one of your calves.” But he went to the great university of
the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty,
for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken
many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of
Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humani-
ties, and not any study of grammar. He would have left a
Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling
man.

He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal,
but, for the most part, see nothing at all, — the Puritans. It
would be in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of
Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some
of tlie Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled
in New England. They were a class that did something else
than celebrate their forefathers’ day, and eat parched corn in
remembrance of that time. They were neither Democrats nor
Republicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward,
prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear
God, not making many compromises, nor seeking after avail-
able candidates.

"In his camp,” as one has recently written, and as I have
myself heard him state, "he permitted no profanity; no man
of loose morals was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed,
as a prisoner of war. 'I would rather,’ said he, 'Jiave the small-
pox, yellow fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than
a man without principle. ... It is a mistake, sir, that our
people make, when they think that bullies are the best
fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these South-
erners. Give me men of good principles,— God-fearing men,—

686 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will
oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.^
He said that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him,
who was forward to tell what he could or would do if he could
only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in
him.

He was never able to find more than a score or so of re-
cruits whom he would accept, and only about a dozen, among
them his sons, in whom he had perfect faith. When he was
here some years ago, he showed to a few a little manuscript
I^ook, — ^his “orderly book’’ I think he called it, — containing
the names of his company in Kansas, and the rules by which
they bound themselves; and he stated that several of them
had already sealed the contract with their blood. When some
one remarked that, with the addition of a chaplain, it would
have been a perfect Cromwellian troop, he observed that he
would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could
have found one who could fill that office worthily. It is easy
enough to find one for the United States army. I believe that
he had prayers in his camp morning and evening, nevertheless.

He was a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupu-
lous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying
that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier,
or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life
of exposure.

A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as
of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and
principles, — that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to
a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of
a life. I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke
within bounds.<I remember, particularly, how, in his speech
here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas,
without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. It was
a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. Also referring to the
deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away
his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 687
force and meaning, “They had a perfect right to be hung,”
He was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to Bun-
combe or his constituents anywhere, had no need to invent
anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his
own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong,
and eloquence in Congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a
discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with
those of an ordinary king.

As for his tact and prudence, I will merely say, that at a
time when scarcely a man from the Free States was able to
reach Kansas by any direct route, at least without having his
arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect guns and
other weapons he could collect, openly and slowly drove an
ox-cart through Missouri, apparently in the capacity of a
surveyor, with his surveying compass exposed in it, and so
passed unsuspected, and had ample opportunity to learn the
designs of the enemy. For some time after his arrival he still
followed the same profession. When, for instance, he saw a
knot of the ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the
single topic which then occupied their minds, he would, per-
haps, take his compass and one of his sons, and proceed to run
an imaginary line right through the very spot on which that
conclave had assembled, and when he came up to them, he
would naturally pause and have some talk with them, learn-
ing their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly; and hav-
ing thus completed his real survey he would resume his imag-
inary one, and run on his line till he was out of sight.

When I expressed surprise that he could live in Kansas at
all, with a price set upon his head, and so large a number,
including the authorities, exasperated against him, he ac-
counted for it by saying, “It is perfectly well understood that
I will not be taken.” Much of the time for some years he has
had to skulk in swamps, suffering from poverty and from
sickness, which was the consequence of exposure, befriended
only by Indians and a few whites. But though it might be
known that he was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes

688 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
commonly did not care to go in after him. He could even
come out into a town where there were more Border Ruffians
than Free State men, and transact some business, without de-
laying long, and yet not be molested; for, said he, ''no little
handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body
could not be got together in season.’^

As for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about
it. It was evidently far from being a wild and desperate at-
tempt. His enemy, Mr. Vallandigham, is compelled to say that
"it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies
that ever failed,”

Not to mention his other successes, was it a failure, or did
it show a want of good management, to deliver from bondage
a dozen human beings . and walk off with them by broad day-
light, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through
one State after another, for half the length of the North, con-
spicuous to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going
into a court-room on his way and telling what he had done,
thus convincing Missouri that it was not profitable to try to
hold slaves in his neighborhood? — and this, not because the
government menials were lenient, but because they were afraid
of him.

Yet he did not attribute hib success, foolishly, to "his star,”
or to any magic. He said, truly, that the reason why such
greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his
prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause ^ — kind of
armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time
came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in
defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that
this should be their last act in this world.

But to make haste to his last act, and its effects.

The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really igno-
rant of the fact that there are at least as many as two or three
individuals to a town throughout the North who think much as
the present speaker does about him and his enterprise. I do
not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 689
party. We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid
chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but dese-
crating every house and every day we breathe in. Perhaps
anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men
and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but
their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves
that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They
are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact,
which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the
free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if
it had succeeded. They at most only criticize the tactics.
Though we wear no crape, the thought of that man’s position
and probable fate is spoiling many a man’s day here at the
North for other thinking. If any one who has seen him here
can pursue successfully any other train of thought, I do not
know whai he is made of. If there is any such who gets his
usual allowance of sleep, I will warrant him to fatten easily
under any circumstances which do not touch his body or
purse. I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow,
and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one
may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I
have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writ-
ers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary
malefactor, though one of unusual “pluck,” — as the Governor
of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the
cock-pit, “the gamest man he ever saw,” — ^had been caught,
and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes
when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns what
sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of
some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was
dead, one of my townsmen observed that “he died as the fool
dieth;” which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness
in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted,
said disparagingly, that “he threw his life away,” because he
resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their

690 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
lives, pray? — such as would praise a man for attacking singly
an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. I hear another ask,
Yankee-like, “What will he gain by it?^’ as if he expected to
fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of
gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a “sur-
prise” party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote
of thanks, it must be a failure. “But he won’t gain anything
by it.” Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get four-and-six-
pence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then
he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul, —
and such a soul! — ^when you do not. No doubt you can get
more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of
blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their
blood to.

Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that,
in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is
inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivat-
ing; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop
of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and
vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate.

The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a
blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the
soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet
laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful,
charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of
Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as
much more memorable than that as an intelligent and con-
scientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that
that will go unsung?

“Served him right,” — “A dangerous man,” — “He is un-
doubtedly insane.” So they proceed to live their sane, and
wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their Plutarch
a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of Putnam, who was
let down into a wolf’s den; and in this wise they nourish
themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other.
The Tract Society could afford to print that story of Putnam.

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 691
You might open the district schools with the reading of it, for
there is nothing about Slavery or the Church in it; unless
it occurs to the reader that some pastors are wolves in sheep^s
clothing. ‘‘The American Board of Commissioners for For-
eign Missions,’’ even, might dare to protest against that wolf.
I have heard of boards, and of American boards, but it
chances that I never heard of this particular lumber till lately.
And yet I hear of Northern men, and women, and children,
by families, buying a “life-membership” in such societies as
these. A life-membership in the grave! You can get buried
cheaper than that.

Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly
a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but
universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of
vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice; and hence
are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slav-
ery of all kinds. We are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with
livers in the place of hearts. The curse is the worship of idols,
which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image
himself; and the New Englander is just as much an idolater
as the Hindoo. This man was an exception, for he did not set
up even a political graven image between him and his God.

A church that can never have done with excommunicat-
ing Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat
churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step
forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt
that will save you, and defend our nostrils.

The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say
all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go
straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. All his prayers
begin with “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and he is forever
looking forward to the time when he shall go to his ^^long
rest.” He has consented to perform certain old-established
charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear
of any new-fangled ones; he doesn’t wish to have any supple-
mentary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the pres-

692 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
ent time. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and
the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a
stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Many, no
doubt^ are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by
habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by
higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce
this man insane, for they know that they could never ict as
he does, as long as they are themselves.

We dream of foreign countries, of other times and ra :es
of men, placing them at a distance in history or space ; but
let some significant event like the present occur in our midst,
and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness be-
tween us and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias,
and Chinas, and South Sea Islands. Our crowded society be-
comes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the
eye, — a city of magnificent distances. We discover why it
was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces
with them before; we become aware of as many versts be-
tween us and them as there are between a wandering Tartar
and a Chinese town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit
in the thoroughfares of the market-place. Impassable seas
suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch
themselves out there. It is the difference of constitution, of
intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that
make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals
and between states. None but the like-minded can come pleni-
potentiary to our court.

I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after
this event, and I do not remember in them a single expression
of sympathy for these men. I have since seen one noble state-
ment, in a Boston paper, not editorial. Some voluminous
sheets decided not to print the full report of Brownes words
to the exclusion of other matter. It was as if a publisher
should reject the manuscript of the New Testament, and print
Wilson’s last speech. The same joun. a which contained this
pregnant news was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with

A PLEA FOR jOHN BROWN 693
the reports of the political conventions that were being held.
But the descent to them was too steep. They should have
been spared this contrast, — been printed in an extra, at least
To turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the
cackling of political conventions! Office-seekers and speech-
makers, who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear
their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk! Their great game
is the game of straws, or rather that universal aboriginal
game of the platter, at which the Indians cried hub, bub I
Exclude the reports of religious and political conventions,
and publish the words of a living man.

But I object not so much to what they have omitted as to
what they have inserted. Even the Liberator called it “a
misguided, wild, and apparently insane — effort.^’ As for the
herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know
an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything
which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the
number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would
be expedient. How then can they print truth? If we do
not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to
us. And so they do like some traveling auctioneers, who
sing an obscene song, in order to draw a crowd around
them. Republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready
for the morning edition, and accustomed to look at every-
thing by the twilight of politics, express no admiration, nor
true sorrow even, but call these men ^^deluded fanatics, — ■
^‘mistaken men,’’ — ^'insane,” or ‘‘crazed.” It suggests what a
sane set of editors we are blessed with, not “mistaken men;”
who know very well on which side their bread is buttered,
at least.

A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all
sides, we hear people and parties declaring, “I didn’t do it,
nor countenance inm to do it, in any conceivable way. It
can’t be fairly inferred from my past career.” I, for one, am
not interested to hear you define your position. I don’t know
that I ever was or ever shall be. I think it is mere egotism,

694 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
or impertinent at this time. Ye needn’t take so much pains
to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent man will ever be
convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and
came, as he himself informs us, “under the auspices of John
Brown and nobody else.” The Republican party does not per-
ceive how many his jailure will make to vote more correctly
than they would have them. They have counted the votes of
Pennsylvania & Co., but they have not correctly counted
Captain Brown’s vote. He has taken the wind out of their
sails, — the little wind they had, — and they may as well lie
to and repair.

What though he did not belong to your clique! Though
you may not approve of his method or his principles, recog-
nize his magnanimity. Would you not like to claim kindred-
ship with him in that, though in no other thing he is like,
or likely, to you? Do you think that you would lose your
reputation so? What you lost at the spile, you would gain at
the bung.

If they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the
truth, and say what they mean. They are simply at their old
tricks still.

“It was always conceded to him,” says one who calls him
crazy, “that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his
demeanor, apparently inoffensive, until the subject of Slavery
was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indigna-
tion unparalleled.”

The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying vic-
tims; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew
of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers,
is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the
politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliver-
ance is to be obtained is by “the quiet diffusion of the senti-
ments of humanity,” without any “outbreak.” As if the senti-
ments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its
deeds, and you could disperse them, all finished to order, the
pure article, as easily as water with a watering-pot, and so

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 695
lay the dust. What is that that I hear cast overboard? The
bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. That is the
way we are ^‘diffusing” humanity, and its sentiments with it.

Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with
politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their
ignorance, that he acted “on the principle of revenge.’’ They
do not know the man. They must enlarge themselves to con-
ceive of him. I have no doubt that the time will come when
they will begin to see him as he was. They have got to con-
ceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a
politician or an Indian ; of a man who did not wait till he was
personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless busi-
ness before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.

If Walker may be considered the representative of the
South, I wish I could say that Brown was the representative
of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his
bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recog-
nize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid.
For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics
into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America
has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dig-
nity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and
the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was
the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer,
making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a
match for all the judges that American voters, or office-
holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have
been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not
exist. When a man stands up serenely against the condemna-
tion and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally
by a whole body , — even though he were of late the vilest
murderer, who has settled that matter with himself, — the
spectacle is a sublime one, — didn’t ye know it, ye Liberators f
ye Tribunes, ye Republicans ? — and we become criminal in
comparison. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He
needs none of your respect.

696 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

As for the Democratic journals, they are not human enough
to affect me at all. I do not feel indignation at anything
they may say.

I am aware that I anticipate a little, — that he was still, at
the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes; but that
being the case, I have all along found myself thinking and
speaking of him as physically dead.

I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live
in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the
earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of Cap-
tain Brown in the Massachusetts State-House yard than that
of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this
age, that I am his contemporary.

What a contrast, when we turn to that political party
which is so anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its
way, and looking around for some available slaveholder, per-
haps, to be its candidate, at least for one who will execute
the Fugitive Slave Law, and all those other unjust laws which
he took up arms to annul I

Insane 1 A father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and
several more men besides, — ^as many at least as twelve dis-
ciples, — all struck with insanity at once ; while the sane tyrant
holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves,
and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their
country and their bacon! Just as insane were his efforts in
Kansas. Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the
sane man or the insane? Do the thousands who know him
best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have
afforded him material aid there, think him insane? Such a
use of this word is a mere trope with most who persist in
using it, and I have no doubt that many of the rest have
already in silence retracted their words.

Read his admirable answers to Mason and others. How
they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! On the one
side, half-brutish, half-timid questioning; on the other, truth,
clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. They

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 697
are made to stand with Pilate, and Gessler, and the Inqui-
sition. How ineffectual their speech and action! and what a
void their silence! They are but helpless tools in this great
work. It was no human power that gathered them about this
preacher.

What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane
representatives to Congress for, of late years? — to declare
with effect what kind of sentiments? All their speeches put
together and boiled down — and probably they themselves
will confess it — do not match for manly directness and force,
and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John
Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house, — ►
that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other
world, though not to represent you there. No, he was not out
representative in any sense. He was too fair a specimen of a
man to represent the like of us. Who, then, were his constit-
uents? If you read his words understandingly you will find
out. In his case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor
maiden speech, no compliments to the oppressor. Truth is his
inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He
could afford to lose his Sharps rifles, while he retained his
faculty of speech, — a Sharps rifle of infinitely surer and
longer range.

And the New York Herald reports the conversation ver-
batim! It does not know of what undying words it is made
the vehicle,

I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can
read the report of that conversation and still call the prin-
cipal in it insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an
ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organ-
ization, secure. Take any sentence of it, — “Any questions that
I can honorably answer, I will ; not otherwise. So far as I am
myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value
my word, sir.” The few who talk about his vindictive spirit,
while they really admire bis heroism, have no test by which

698 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure
gold. They mix their own dross with it.

It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony
of his more truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen.
Governor Wise speaks far more justly and appreciatingly of
him than any Northern editor, or politician, or public per-
sonage, that I chance to have heard from. I knov/ that you
can afford to hear him again on this subject. He says: “They
are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman. . . .
He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just
to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners. . . . And
he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of
truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous” (I leave that part
to Mr. Wise), “but firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men,
too, who survive, are like him. . . . Colonel Washington says
that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defy-
ing danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and
another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with
one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded
his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be
firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three
white prisoners, Brown, Stevens, and Coppoc, it was hard to
say which was most firm.”

Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has
learned to respect !

The testimony of Mr. Vallandigham, though less valuable,
is of the same purport, that “it is vain to underrate either the
man or his conspiracy. ... He is the farthest possible re-
moved from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.”

“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” say the journals. What
is the character of that calm which follows when the law
and the slaveholder prevail? I regard this event as a touch-
stone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the
character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted
to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When
A government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice,

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 69V
as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave,
it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal
force. It is the head of the Plug-Uglies. It is more manifest
than ever that tyranny rules. I see this government to be
effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing
mankind. There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions
of slaves ; here comes their heroic liberator. This most hypo-
critical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on
the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption
of innocence: ^What do you assault me for? Am I not an
honest man? Cease agitation on this subject, or I will make a
slave of you, too, or else hang you.^^

We talk about a representative government; but what a
monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties
of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented. A semi-
human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart
taken out and the top of its brain shot away. Heroes have
fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but
I never heard of any good done by such a government as
that.

The only government that I recognize— and it matters not
how few are at the head of it, or how small its army — ^is
that power that establishes justice in the land, never that
which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a govern-
ment to which all the truly brave and just men in the land
are enemies, standing between it and those whom it op-
presses? A government that pretends to be Christian and
crucifies a million Christs every day!

Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot
help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments. Can
you dry up the fountains of thought? High treason, when
it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and
is first committed by, the power that makes and forever recre-
ates man. When you have caught and hung all these human
rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt,
for you have not struck at the fountain-head. You presume to

700 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled
cannon point not. Can all the art of the cannon founder tempt
matter to turn against its maker? Is the form in which the
founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitu-
tion of it and of himself?

The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves.
They are determined to keep them in this condition; and
Massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to pre-
vent their escape. Such are not all the inhabitants of Massa-
chusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here. It
was Massachusetts, as well as Virginia, that put down this
insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. She sent the marines there,
and she will have to pay the penalty of her sin.

Suppose that there is a society in this State that out of
its own purse and magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves
that run to us, and protects our colored fellow-citizens, and
leaves the other work to the government, so called. Is not
that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming
contemptible to mankind? If private men are obliged to per-
form the offices of government, to protect the weak and dis-
pense justice, then the government becomes only a hired
man^ or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. Of
course, that is but the shadow of a government whose exist-
ence necessitates a Vigilant Committee. What should we
think of the Oriental Cadi even, behind whom worked in
secret a Vigilant Committee? But such is the character of
our Northern States generally; each has its Vigilant Com-
mittee. And, to a certain extent, these crazy governments
recognize and accept this relation. They say, virtually,
“We’ll be glad to work for you on these terms, only don’t
make a noise about it.” And thus the government, its salary
being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the Con-
stitution with it, and bestows most of its labor on repairing
that. When I hear it at work sometimes, as I go by, it re-
minds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter contrive
to turn a penny by following the coopering business. And

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 701
what kind of spirit is their barrel made to hold? They specu-
late in stocks, and bore holes in mountains, but they are not
competent to lay out even a decent highway. The only free
road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by
the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole
breadth of the land. Such a government is losing its power
and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky
vessel, and is held by one that can contain it.

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few.
When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would
you have had him wait till that time came? — till you and I
came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or
troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from
ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few
could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there
laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked
man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; appar-
ently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted
humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the
benefit of his fellow-man. It may be doubted if there were
as many more their equals in these respects in all the coun-
try, — I speak of his followers only, — for their leader, no
doubt, scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his
troop. These alone were ready to step between the oppressor
and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you
could select to be hung. That was the greatest compliment
which this country could pay them. They were ripe for her
gallows. She has tried a long time, she has hung a good many,
but never found the right one before.

When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law,
not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceed-
ing coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not
years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and winter-
ing the thought, without expecting any reward but a good
conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the
other side,— I say again that it affects me as a sublime spec-

702 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
tacle. If he had had any journal advocating ^^hi$ cause , any
organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely play-
ing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it
would have been fatal to his efficiency. If he had acted in
any way so as to be let alone by the government, he might
have been suspected. It was the fact that the tyrant must
give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him
from all the reformers of the day that I know.

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right
to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue
the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked
by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death
of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked
by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think
him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate
the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the
philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which
neither shoots me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not
think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talk-
ing or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously
inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other af-
fairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but
I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would
be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of
our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look
at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail!
Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment!
We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this
provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts,
and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my country-
men think that the only righteous use that can be made of
Sharps rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when
we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot
fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the
Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 703
cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use
them.

The same indignation that is said to have cleared the
temple once will clear it again. The question is not about
the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has ap-
peared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow-man so well,
and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He took up
his life and he laid it down for him. What sort of violence is
that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable
citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel,
not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not
so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?

This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death,
— the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had
ever died in America before; for in order to die you must
first have lived. I don’t believe in the hearses, and palls, and
funerals that they have had. There was no death in the case
because there had been no life ; they merely rotted or sloughed
off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. No
temple’s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. Let the
dead bury their dead. The best of them fairly ran down like
a clock. Franklin, — ^Washington, — they were let off without
dying; they were merely missing one day. I hear a good
many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have
died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I’ll defy them to do
it. They haven’t got life enough in them. They’ll deliquesce
like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot
where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since
the world began. Do you think that you are going to die,
sir? No! there’s no hope of you. You haven’t got your lesson
yet. You’ve got to stay after school. We make a needless ado
about capital punishment, — taking lives, when there is no
life to take. Memento mori! We don’t understand that sub-
lime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his grave-
stone once. We’ve interpreted it in a groveling and sniveling
sense; we’ve wholly forgotten how to die.

704 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and
finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when
to end.

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same
time taught us how to live. If this man^s acts and words do
not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire
on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America
has ever heard. It has already quickened the feeble pulse of
the North, and infused more and more generous blood into
her veins and heart than any number of years of what is called
commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man
who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to
live fori

One writer says that Brown’s peculiar monomania made
him to be “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural
being.” Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is
always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himseli
superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.

“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man I”

Newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his
insanity that he thought he was appointed to do this work
which he did, — that he did not suspect himself for a moment!
They talk as if it were impossible that a man could be
“divinely appointed” in these days to do any work whatever;
as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with
any man’s daily work; as if the agent to abolish slavery
could only be somebody appointed by the President, or by
some political party. They talk as if a man’s death were a
failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character,
were a success.

When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself,
and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges
and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 70S
themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens
and earth are asunder.

The amount of it is, our Heading are a harmless kind
of folk, and they know well enough that they were not
divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party.

Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be
hung? Is it indispensable to any Northern man? Is there no
resource but to cast this man also to the Minotaur? If you
do not wish it, say so distinctly. While these things are being
done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie.
Think of him, — of his rare qualities! — such a man as it takes
ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the
representative of any party. A man such as the sun may not
rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went
the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the re-
deemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you
can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who
pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are
about to do to him who offered himself to be the saviour of
four millions of men.

Any man knows when he is Justified, and all the wits in the
world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer al-
ways knows that he is justly punished; but when a govern-
ment takes the life of a man without the consent of his con-
science, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step
towards its own dissolution. Is it not possible that an indi-
vidual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to
be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by
any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there
any necessity for a man^s being a tool to perform a deed of
which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-
makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to
interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?
What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself
that you will do thus or so, against the light within you? Is
it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution

706 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced
upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? I do not
believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a
man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own
ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no
consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let
lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that
among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the ever-
lasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another
thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave
land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free men can
you expect from that?

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his
life, but for his character, — his immortal life; and so it be-
comes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some
eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified ; this morn-
ing, perchance. Captain Brown was hung. These are the two
ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old
Brown any longer ; he is an angel of light.

I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and human-
est man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it
himself. I almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance,
doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good
as his death.

^^Misguided!’’ ‘^Garrulous!” “Insane!^’ ^Windictive!’^ So
ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds
from the floor of the Armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as
the voice of nature is: “No man sent me here; it was my own
prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master
in human form.’’

And in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, address-
ing his captors, who stand over him: “I think, my friends, you
are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity, and
it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you
so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in
bondage.”

A PLEA FOR JOHN BROWN 707

And, referring to his movement: ^Ht is, in my opinion, the
greatest service a man can render to God.”

pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them;
that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity,
revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the op-
pressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as
precious in the sight of God.”

You don’t know your testament when you see it.

want you to understand that I respect the rights of the
poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave
power, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and
powerful.”

“I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you
people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of
that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than
you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the
better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly dis-
posed of now; but this question is still to be settled, — this
negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.”

I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene,
no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it;
the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims
and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament
of some future national gallery, when at least the present form
of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty
to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we wiU
take our revenge.

LIFE WITHOUT I RINCIPLE

[*^Life Without Principle^^ was first published posi*
humously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. The en
tire essay j allows \

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE

At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen
a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me
as much as he might have done. He described things not in or
near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies.
There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing
thought in the lecture. I would have had him deal with his
privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest complb
ment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what
I thought^ and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as
well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he
would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the took
Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know
how many acres I make of their land, — since I am a surveyor
— or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with.
They never will go to law for my meat ; they prefer the shell.
A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture
on Slavery; but on conversing with him, I found that he and
his clique expected seven eighths of the lecture to be theirs,
and only one eighth mine; so I declined. I take it for granted,
when I am invited to lecture anywhere, — for I have had a
little experience in that business, — that there is a desire to
hear what 1 think on some subject, though I may be the great-
est fool in the country, — and not that I should say pleasant
things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and 1
resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of
myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me,
and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore
them beyond all precedent.

So now I would say something similar to you, my readers

711

712 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a
traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but
come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave
out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!
f am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomo-
tive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would
be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing
but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to
write thoughts in ; they are commonly ruled for dollars and
cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields,
took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man
was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a
cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it
is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for — -
business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more
opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this
incessant business.

There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in
the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall
under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have
put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he
wishes me to spend three weeks digging there v/ith him. The
result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to
hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do
this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-
working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain
labors which yield more real profit, though but little money,
they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless,
as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate
me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this
fellow's undertaking any more than in many an enterprise
of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may
be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a differ-
'mt school.

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 713

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each
day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he
spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods
and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an
industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no
interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to em-
ploy them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throw-
ing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But
many are no more worthily employed now. For instance: just
after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed one of my
neighbors walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing
a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by
an atmosphere of industry, — his day’s work begun, — his brow
commenced to sweat, — a reproach to all sluggards and idlers,
— pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turn-
ing round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they
gained their length on him. And I thought. Such is the labor
which the American Congress exists to protect, — honest,
manly tnil^ — honest as the day is long, — that makes his bread
taste sweet, and keeps society sweet, — which all men respect
and have consecrated; one of the sacred band, doing the need-
ful but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight reproach, be-
cause I observed this from a window, and was not abroad and
stirring about a similar business. The day went by, and at
evening I passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps
many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he
adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw the stone of
the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to
adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises, and the dignity
forthwith departed from the teamster’s labor, in my eyes.
In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than
this. I may add that his employer has since run off, in debt
to a good part of the town, and, after passing through Chan-
cery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more
a patron of the arts.

714 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

The ways by which you may get money almost without
exception lead downward. To have done anything by which
you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.
If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer
pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get
money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is
to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the com-
munity will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to
render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The
State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely.
Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate
the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of
wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse
to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that
kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my
employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do
my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When
I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my em-
ployer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not
which is most correct. I once invented a rule for measuring
cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the meas-
urer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their
wood measured correctly, — that he was already too accurate
for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood meas-
ured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to
get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and,
even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to
pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they
were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for
scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does
your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed,
so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would
commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. I see ad-
vertisements for active young men, as if activity were the

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 715
whole of a young man's capital. Yet I have been surprised
when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man,
to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely
nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto.
What a doubtful compliment this to pay me! As if he had
met me halfway across the ocean beating up against the wind,
but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with
him! If I did, what do you think the underwriters would say?
No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the
voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-
bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native
port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you
cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding
his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he
can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The in-
efficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are
forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose
that they were rarely disappointed.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my
freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to
society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors
which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that
I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are
as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often re-
minded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful.
But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the
labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If
I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as
most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be noth-
ing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell
my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a
man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the
greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises

716 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
are self-supporting* The poet, for instance, must sustain his
body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers
TV'ith the shavings it makes. You must get your living by lov-
ing. But as it said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a
hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this stand-
ard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not
to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by
the charity of friends, or a government-pension, — ^provided
you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonyms you de-
scribe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sun-
days the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of
stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater
than hLs income. In the Catholic Church, especially, they go
into Chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think
to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about
the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it
is an important difference between two, that the one is satis-
fied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-
blank shots, but the other, however lew and unsuccessful his
life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very
slight angle to the horizon. I should much rather be the last
man, — though, as the Orientals say, ‘^Greatness doth not ap-
proach him who is forever looking down; and all those who
are looking high are growing poor.’^

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remem-
bered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make
getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but alto-
gether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so,
then living is not. One would think, from looking at liter-
ature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary indi-
viduaFs musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with
their experience to speak of it? The lesson of value which
money teaches, which the Author of the Universe has taken
so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether.

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 717
As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men
of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called, — ^whether
they inherit, or earn, or steal it. I think that Society has done
nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what
she has done. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my
nature than those methods which men have adopted and
advise to ward them off.

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How
can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how
to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and
intellectually subtle? Does Wisdom work in a treadmill? or
does she teach how to succeed by her example? Is there any
such thing as wisdom not applied to life? Is she merely the
miller who grinds the finest logic? It is pertinent to ask if
Plato got his living in a better way or more successfully than
his contemporaries, — or did he succumb to the difficulties of
life like other men? Did he seem to prevail over some of them
merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it
easier to live, because his aunt remembered him in her will?
The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live,
are mere make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of
life, — chiefly because they do not know, but partly because
they do not mean, any better.

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not
merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so
called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on man-
kind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the
means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without
contributing any value to society! And that is called enter-
prise! I know of no more startling development of the immor-
tality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living.
The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind
are not worth the dust of a puff-ball. The hog that gets his liv-
ing by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of
such company. If I could command the wealth of all the
worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for

718 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
it. Even Mahomet knew that God did not make this world
in jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scat-
ters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble
for them. The world’s raffle! A subsistence in the domains of
Nature a thing to be raffled for! What a comment, what a
satire, on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that man-
kind will hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in
all the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most
admirable invention of the human race only an improved
muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals and Occi-
dentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living, digging
where we never planted, — and He would, perchance, reward
us with lumps of gold?

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him
to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a fac-
simile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and
obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the
most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has
seen. I did not know that mankind were suffering for want
of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malle-
able, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a
great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much
a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What
difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice?
If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy
of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations
there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked
hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The
way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The
humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says
that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold
thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest
toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has
seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there,

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 719
that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lot-
tery, where the fact is not so obvious.

After reading Howitt^s account of the Australian gold-
diggings one evening, I had in my mind’s eye, all night, the
numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul
pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet
across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with
water, — the locality to which men furiously rush to probe
for their fortunes, — uncertain where they shall break ground,
— not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself, — some-
times digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike
the vein, or then missing it by a foot, — turned into demons,
and regardless of each others’ rights, in their thirst for riches,
— whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by
the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned
in them, — standing in water, and covered with mud and
clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and dis-
ease. Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I was think-
ing, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as
others do; and with that vision of the diggings still before
me, I asked myself why / might not be washing some gold
daily, though it were only the finest particles, — why I might
not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that
mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you, — what though
it were a sulky-gully? At any rate, I might pursue some
path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I
could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man sepa-
rates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood,
there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers
may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots
will turn out the higher way of the two.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold
were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very
opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther
and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortu-
nate when they think themselves most successful. Is not our

720 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden
mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this
for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining
particles and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell,
if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the
unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any
will dog liis steps, and endeavor to supplant him. He may
claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the culti-
vated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in
peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not
mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim
twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, but may mine anywhere,
and wash the whole wide world in his tom.

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which
weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Aus-
tralia: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all
about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people,
called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then
kindly informed them that he was The bloody wretch that
had found the nugget.^ At last he rode full speed against a
tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.’^ I think, however,
there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his
brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, “He is a hope-
lessly ruined man.’’ But he is a type of the class. They are
all fast men. Hear some of the names of the places where they
dig: “Jackass Flat,” — ^“Sheep’s-Head Gully,” — “Murderer’s
Bar,” etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry
their ill-gotten wealth where they will, I am thinking it will
still be “Jackass Flat,” if not “Murderer’s Bar,’’ where they
live.

The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of
graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which ap-
pears to be but in its infancy; for, according to late accounts,
an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of New
Granada, regulating this kind of mining; and a correspond-
ent of the Tribune writes: “In the dry season, when the

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 721
weather will permit of the country being properly prospected,
no doubt other rich guacas [that is, graveyards] will be
found.’’ To emigrants he says: “Do not come before Decem-
ber; take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del
Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber your-
self with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be neces-
sary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost
all that is required:” advice which might have been taken
from the “Burker’s Guide.” And he concludes with this line
in Italics and small capitals: ‘7/ you art doing well at home^
STAY THERE,” which may fairly be interpreted to mean, “If
you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home,
stay there.”

But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New
England, bred at her own school and church.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are se
few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing
the ways of men. Most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the
age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an
aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these
things, — to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it.
The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was grovel-
ing. The burden of it was, — It is not worth your while to
undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask
how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do,
— and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his
innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the
sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then
he is but one of the Devil’s angels. As we grow old, we live
more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some
extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be
fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of
those who are more unfortunate than ourselves.

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no
true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and
bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only

722 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or
not, in order to discover it. Why must we daub the heavens
as well as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery that
Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was an-
other. But it was a more crueL suggestion that possibly that
was the reason why the former went in search of the latter.
There is not a popular magazine in this country that would
dare to print a child’s thought on important subjects without
comment. It must be submitted to the D. D.’s. I would it
were the chicka-dee-dees.

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to at-
tend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to
all the world.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad
and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most
with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against
some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is,
some particular, not un versal, way of viewing things. 'Fhey
will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow
skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unob-
structed heavens you would view. Get out of the way with
your cobwebs, wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums
they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of
religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and v/hen
I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena
and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I
have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I
was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them.
Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the greatest
scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written
the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the in-
quiry is. Where did you come from? or. Where are you going?
That was a more pertinent question which I overheard one of
my auditors put to another once, — “What does he lecture
for?” It made me quake in my shoes.

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 723
serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell
in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the
rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and
barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest
on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive
rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of
who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sub-
tilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an
immense frivolity ; for, while there are manners and compli-
ments we do not meet, we do not teach oixe another the lessons
of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness
and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual,
however ; for we do not habitually demand any more of each
other.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how character-
istic, but superficial, it was! — only another kind of politics
or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the
country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of
thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were
merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and
all together on nothing ; as the Hindoos made the world rest
on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise
on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent.
For all fruit of that stir we have the Kossuth hat.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our
ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life
ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates
into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any
news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by
his neighbor ; and, for the most part, the only difference be-
tween us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper,
or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our
inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to
the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow
who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud

724 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself
this long while.

I do not know but it is too much lo read one newspaper
a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me
that I have not dwelt in my pative region. The sun, the
clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You can-
not serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devo-
tion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read
or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be
.30 trivial, — considering what one’s dreams and expectations
are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we
hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the
stalest repetition. You are often tempted to ask why such
stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had,
— ^that, after twenty-five years, you should meet Hobbins,
Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not
budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts ap-
pear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules
of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thalluSy or surface
of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a
parasitic growth. We should wash ourselves clean of such
news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if
there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we
have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not
live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to
see the world blow up.

All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you un-
consciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now
you find it was because the morning and the evening were
full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents. You
attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own af-
fairs in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move
and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events
that make the news transpire, — thinner than the paper on
which it is printed, — then these things will fill the world for

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 725
yon ; but if you soar about or dive below that plane, you can-
not remember nor be reminded of them. Really to see the
sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a uni-
versal fact, would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What
are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like in-
sects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them
memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so man)
men. It is individuals that populate the world. Any man
thinking may say with the Spirit of Lodin, —

‘T look down from my height on nations,

And they become ashes before me; —

Calm is my dwelling in the clouds ;

Pleasant are the great fields of my rest.”

Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-
fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other’s
ears.

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often per-
ceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the de-
tails of some trivial affair, — the news of the street; and I am
astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their
minds with such rubbish, — ^to permit idle rumors and inci-
dents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground
which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public
arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the
tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of
heaven itself, — an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the serv-
ice of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few fact?
which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my at-
tention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine
mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news
in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve
the mind’s chastity in this respect. Thiiik of admitting the
details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts,
to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for

726 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the
mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the
street had occupied us, — the very street itself, with all its
travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’
shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?
When I have been compelled to sit spectator and auditor in
a court room for some hours, and have seen my neighbors,
who were not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and
tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared
to my mind’s eye, that, when they took off their hats, their
ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between
which even their narrow heads were crowded. Like the vanes
of windmills, they caught the broad but shallow stream of
sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their coggy
brains, passed out the other side. I wondered if, when they
got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before
their hands and faces. It has seemed to me, at such a time,
2hat the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel,
the judge and the criminal at the bar, — if I may presume him
guilty before he is convicted, — ^were all equally criminal, and
a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and consume
them all together.

By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the ex-
treme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from
the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to
forget what it is worse than useless to remember ! If I am to
be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks,
the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is
inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the atten-
tive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane
and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court.
The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only
the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be
open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be per-
manently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things,
so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 727
very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were, — its founda-
tion broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll
over; and if you would know what will make the most durable
pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphal-
tum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have
been subjected to this treatment so long.

If we have thus desecrated ourselves, — as who has not? —
the remedy will be wariness and devotion to reconsecrate
ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should
treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous
children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects
and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the
Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length
as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the
mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each
morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and
living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but
in flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes
through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the
ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much
it has been used. How many things there are concerning which
we might well deliberate whether we had better know them,
— had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the
slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by
which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time
to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refine^
ment, — ^but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?
— to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and
make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell,
with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions
be like those chestnut-burs which contain abortive nuts, per-
fect only to prick the fingers?

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of free'
dom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a
merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that
the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, hf

728 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now
that the republic — the res-publica — has been settled, it is time
to look after res-privata , — ^the private state, — to see, as the
Roman senate charged its consuls, quid re5-PRiVATA
detrimenti caperet/’ that the private state receive no detri-
ment.

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free
from King George and continue the slaves of King Preju-
dice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What
is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral
freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free,
of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned
about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our chil-
dren’s children who may perchance be really free. We tax
ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not repre-
sented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter
troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves.
We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former
eat up all the latter’s substance.

With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essen-
tially provincial still, not metropolitan, — mere Jonathans.
We are provincial, because we do not find at home our stand-
ards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection
of truth ; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclu-
sive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and
agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the
end.

So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country-
bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more impor-
tant question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for
instance, — the English question why did I not say? Their
natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breed-
ing” respects only secondary objects. The finest manners in
the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with
a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past
days, — mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 729
of date. It is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that
they are continually being deserted by the character ; they are
cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged
to the living creature. You are presented with the shells in-
stead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally, that, in the
case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than
meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if
he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosi-
ties, when I wished to see himself. It was not in this sense that
the poet Decker called Christ ^^the first true gentleman that
ever breathed.” I repeat that in this sense the most splendid
court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to con-
sult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of
Rome. A praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the ques-
tions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament
and the American Congress.

Government and legislation: these I thought were respect-
able professions. We have heard of heaven-born Numas,
Lycurguses, and Solons, in the history of the world, whose
names at least may stand for ideal legislators; but think of
legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exporta-
tion of tobacco ! What have divine legislators to do with the
exportation or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones
with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to submit the
question to any son of God, — and has He no children in the
nineteenth century? is it a family which is extinct? — in what
condition would you get it again? What shall a State like
Virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have
been the principal, the staple productions? What ground is
there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from
statistical tables which the States themselves have published.

A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and
raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw,
the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many
lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries, and bitter
almonds were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly wor^

730 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between Leghorn
and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and
bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for her
bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough
to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great ex-
t^t, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style
themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to
think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this
kind of interchange and activity, — the activity of flies about
a molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were
oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

Lieutenant Herndon, whom our Government sent to ex-
plore the Amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slav-
ery, observed that there was wanting there ^^an industrious
and active population, who know what the comforts of life
are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the great re-
sources of the country.’’ But what are the ^^artificial wants”
to be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco
and slaves of, I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and
granite and other material wealth of our native New Eng-
land; nor are “the great resources of a country” that fertility
or barrenness of soil which produces these. The chief want, in
every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest pur-
pose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out “the great re-
sources” of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her re-
sources; for man naturally dies out of her. When we want
culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than
sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed
and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not
slaves, nor operatives, but men, — those rare fruits called
heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in
the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an
institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it,
nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

What is called politics is comparatively something so super-

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 731
ficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recog-
nized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive,
devote some of their columns specially to politics or govern-
ment without charge; and this, one would say, is all that
saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth
also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish
to blunt my sense of right so much. I have not got to answer
for having read a single President’s Message. A strange age
of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics
come a-begging to a private man’s door, snd utter their com-
plaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but 1
find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed,
and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote
for it, — more importunate than an Italian beggar; and if 1
have a mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by
some benevolent merchant s clerk, or the skipper that brought
it over, for it cannot speak a word of English itself, I shall
probably read of the eruption of some Vesuvius, or the over-
flowing of some Po, true or forged, which brought it into this
condition. I do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work,
or the almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence, as I
do commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his
popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The
newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is
reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neg-
lects to read the Daily Times, government will go down on
its knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days.

Those things which now most engage the attention of men,,
as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions
of human society, but should be unconsciously performed,
like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They
are m/m-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake
to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man
may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion
in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.
It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the

732 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU
great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard
of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties
are its two opposite halves, — ^sometimes split into quarters,
it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals,
but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses
itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our
life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great ex-
tent, a remembering, of that which we should never have
been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why
should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad
dreams, but sometimes as ez^peptics, to congratulate each
other on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbi-
tant demand, surely.

The Best of the World’s Best Books

COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN

THE MODERN LIBRARY

For convenience in ordering use number at right of title

ADAMS, HENRY
AESCHYLUS

AIKEN, CONRAD (Editor)

AIKEN, CONRAD (Editor)
ALEICHEM, SHOLOM
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD
AQUINAS, ST. THOMAS
ARISTOTLE
ARISTOTLE
ARISTOTLE
AUDEN, W. H.
AUGUSTINE, ST.
AUSTEN, JANE

BACON, FRANCIS
BALZAC
BALZAC
BALZAC

BEERBOHM, MAX
BELLAMY, ILDWARD
BENNETT, ARNOLD
BERGSON, HENRI
BLAKE, WILLIAM
BOCCACCIO
BOSWELL, JAMES
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE
BRONTE, EMILY
BROWNING, ROBERT
BUCK, PEARL
BURCKHARDT, JACOB

BURK, JOHN N.

BURKE, EDMUND
BUTLER, SAMUEL
BUTLER, SAMUEL
BYRON, LORD
BYRON, LORD
CAESAR, JULIUS

CALDWI-LL, ERSKINE
CALDWELL, ERSKINE
CAMUS, ALBERT
CARROLL, LEWIS
CASANOVA, JACQUES
CELLINI, BENVENUTO
CERVANTES
CHAUCER

The Education of Henry Adams 76
The Complete Greek Tragedies, VoL I
^10

A Comprehensive Anthology of
American Poetry loi
20th-Century American Poetry 127
Selected Stories of 145
Wincsburg, Ohio 104
Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas 259
Introtluction to Aristotle 248
Politics 228

Rhetoric and Poetics 246
Selected Poetry of 1 60
The Confessions of 263
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and
Sensibility 264
Selected Writings of 256
Cousin Bette 299
Droll Stories 193

Perc Cjorioi anti Eugenic Grandet 245

Zulcika Dobson it6

Looking Backward 22

The Old Wives’ Talc 184

Creative Evolution 231

Selected Poetry & Prose of 285

The Decameron 71

The Life of Samuel Johnson 282

Jane Eyre 64

Wuthering Heights 106

Selccteti Poctr> of 198

The Good Earth 1 5

The Civilization of the Renaissance
in Italy 32

The Life and Works of Beethoven 241

Selected Writings of 289

Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136

The Way of All Flesh 13

The Selected Poetry of 195

Don Juan 24

The Gallic War and Other Writings of

295

God’s Little Acre 51

Tobacco Road 249

The Plague 109

Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79

Memoirs of Casanova 165

Autobiography of Cellini 150

Don Quixote 174

The Canterbury Tales 161

CHEKHOV, ANTON
CHEKHOV, ANTON
CICERO
COLERIDGE
COLETTE

COMMAGER, HENRY STEELE
& NEVINS, ALLAN
CONFUCIUS
CONRAD, jOSEPH
CONRAD, JOSEPH
CONRAD, JOSEPH
COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE
CORNEILLE & RACINE
CRANE, STEPHEN
CUMMINGS, E. E.

DANA, RICHARD HENRY
DANTE

DA VINCI, LEONARDO
DEFOE, DANIEL
DEFOE, DANIEL

DESCARTES, RENE
DEWEY, JOHN
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKINSON, EMILY
DINESEN, ISAK
DINESEN, ISAK
DONNE, JOHN

Best Plays by 171

The Short Stories of 50

The Basic Works of 272

Selected Poetry and Prose of 279

Six Novels by 251

A Short History of the United States 235

The Wisdom of Confucius 306

Lord Jim 186

Nostromo 275

Victory 34

The Pathfinder 105

Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194

The Red Badge of Courage 130

The Enormous Room 214

Tw 9 Years Before the Mast 236

The Divine Comedy 208

The Notebooks of 156

Moll Flanders i 22

Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the
Plague Year 92
Philosophical Writings 43
Human Nature and Conduct 173
David Copperficld 110
Pickwick Papers 204
Our Mutual Friend 308
A Talc of Two Cities 189
Selected Poems of 25
Out of Africa 23
Seven Gothic Talcs 54
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of

12

DOS PASSOS, JOHN
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOUGLAS, NORMAN
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN

Three Soldiers 205
The Best Short Stories of 293
The Brothers Karamazov 151
Crime and Punishment 199
The Possessed 55
South Wind 5

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sher-
lock Llolmes 206

DREISER, THEODORE
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
DU MAURIER, DAPHNE
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
EURIPIDES

Sister Carrie 8
Camille 69

The Three Musketeers 143

Rebecca 227

The Journals of 192

Essays and Other Writings 91

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. V

FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FAULKNER, WILLIAM

FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FIELDING, HENRY
FIELDING, HENRY
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE
FORESTER, C. S.

314

Absalom, Absalom* 271
Go Down, Moses 175
Light in August 88
Sanctuary 61

The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay
Dying 187

Selected Stories of 324
Joseph Andrews 117
Tom Jones 185
Madame Bovary 28
The African Queen 102

FRANCE, ANATOLfi
FRANK, ANNE
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
FREUD, SIGMUND
FROST, ROBERT
GALSWORTHY, JOHN

GEORGE, HENRY
GIDE, ANI 3 RE
GOETHE

GOGOL, NIKOLAI
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER

GRAVES, ROBERT
GUNTHER, JOHN
HACKETT, FRANCIS

HAGGARD, H. RIDER
HAMILTON, EDITH
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HART & KAUFMAN
HARTE, BRET

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
HEGEL

HET.LMAN, LILLIAN
HENRY, O.

I HERODOTUS
HERSEY, JOHN
HOMER
HOMER
HORACE

HOWARD, JOHN TASKER
HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN
HUDSON, W. IL
HUGO, VIC'l'OR
HUXLl’.Y, ALDOUS
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
HUXLL.Y, ALDOUS
IBSEN, HENRIK
IBSI'.N, HENRIK
IRVING, WASHINGTON
JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, EIENRY
JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, HENRY
JAMI<:S, HENRY
JAMlvS, WILLIAM
JAMES, WILLIAM

jei'fi:rson, thomas

]OYCE, JAMi:S
JUNG, C. Cr
KAFKA, FRANZ
KAFKA, FRANZ
KANT
KANT

KAUFMAN & HART

Penguin Island 210

Diary of a Young Girl 298

Autobiography, etc. 39

The Intcrpretatifin of Dreams 96

The Poems of 242

The Apple Tree

(in Great Modern Short Stories 168)

Progress and Poverty 36

The Counterfeiters 327

Faust 177

Dead Souls 40

The Vicar of Wakefield and other Writ-
ings 291
I, Claudius 20
Death Be Not Proud 286
The Personal History of Henry the
Eighth 265

She and King Solomon’s Mines 163

The Greek Way 320

Jude the Obscure 135

The Ma\or of Casterbridge 17

The Return of the Native 121

Tecs of the D’H-bervillcs 72

Six Pla\s by 233

The Best Stories of 250

The Scarlet Letter 93

The* Philosophy of 239

Six Pla\s by 223

Best Short Stones of 26

The I’ersian Wars 255

Huoshuna 328

The Ihad 166

The 0 ( 1 ) ssey 167

The Coniplete Works of 141

World's Ch'eat E>peras 302

The Rise of Silas Lapham 277

Green Mansions 80

The Hunchback of Notre Dame 35

Antic Elay 209

Brave New World 48

Point Counter Point 1 80

Six Plavs by 505

The Wild Duck and Other Plays 307

Selected Writings of 240

The Bostonians 1 6

The Portrait of a Lady 107

The Turn of the Screw 169

Washington Square 269

The Wings of the Dove 244

The Philosophy of William James 114

The Varieties of Religious Experience 70

The Life and Selected Writings of 234

Dubliners 124

Basic Writings of 300

The Trial 318

Selected Stories of 283

Critique of Pure Reason 297

The Philosophy of 266

Six PIa\s by 233

KEATS

KIPLING, RUDYARD
KOESTLER, ARTHUR
LAOTSE

LAWRENCE, D. H.
LAWRENCE, D. H.
LAWRENCE, D. H.
LAWRENCE, D. H.

LEWIS, SINCLAIR
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
LIVY

LONGFELLOW, HENRY W.
LOUYS, PIERRE
T.UDWIG, EMIL
MACHIAVELLI
MAILER, NORMAFJ
MALRAUX, ANDRE
MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT
MANN, THOMAS

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
o£ 273
Kim 99

Darkness at Noon 74
The Wisdom of 262
Lady Chatterlcy’s Lover 148
The Rainbow 128
Sons and Lovers 109
Women in Love 68
Dodsworth 252
Cass Timberlanc 221
A History of Rome 325
Poems 56
Aphrodite 77
Napoleon 95

The Prince and The Discourses 65
The Naked and the Dead 32X
Man's Fate 33
On Population 309
Death in Venice (in Great German
Short Novels and Stories io8)

MARQUAND, JOHN P.

MARX, KARL

MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET
MAUGPIAM, W. SOMF.RSET
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE
MAUROIS, ANDRE
MELVILLE, HERMAN
MEREDITH, GEORGE
MEREDITH, GEORGE
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI
MICHENER, JAMES A.

MILL, JOHN STUART
MILTON, JOHN

MOLILRE
MONTAIGNE
NASH, OGDEN
NEVINS, ALLAN &

COMMAGER, HENRY STEELE
NEWMAN, CARDINAL JOHN H.
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH
NOSTRADAMUS
ODETS, CLIFFORD
O’HARA, JOHN
O’HARA, JOHN
O’HARA, JOHN
O’NEILL, EUGENE

O’NEILL, EUGENE

The Late George Apley 182
Capital and Other Writings 202
The Best Short Stories of 14
Cakes and Ale 270
The Moon and Sixpence 27
Of Human Bondage 176
Best Short Stories 98
Disraeli 46
Moby D'ck rig
The Egoist 253

The Ordeal of Richard Fcvercl 134
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci 138
Selected Writings of 296
Selections from 322

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
of John Milton 132
Eight Plays by 78
Sclectctl Essays of 218
The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash 191
A Short Flistory of the United Stales

235

Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1 1 3
Thus Spake Zarathustra 9
Oracles of 81
Six Plays of 67
Appointment in Samarra 42
Selected Short Stories of 2x1
Butterfield 8 325

The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie and
The Hairy Ape 1 46

The Long Voyage Home: Seven Plays
of the Sea 11 1

PALGRAVE, FRANCIS (Editor)
PARKER, DOROTHY
PARKER, DOROTHY
PARKMAN, FRANCIS
PASCAL, BLAISE
PATER, WALTER
ntjnvc QAVfTTTfT.

The Golden Treasury 232

The Collected Short Stories of 1 23

The Collected Poetry of 237

The Oregon Trail 267

Pcns6cs and The Provincial Letters 164

The Renaissance 86

Passages from the Diary of 103

PERELMAN, S. J.

PLATO

PLATO

POE, EDGAR ALLAN
POLO, MARCO
POPE, ALEXANDER
PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE
PORITR, KATHERINE ANNE
PROUST, MARCEL
PROUSl\ MARCEL
PROUST, MARCEL
PROUST, MARCEL
PROUST, MARCEL
PROUST, MARCEr.

PROUST, MARCEL
RACINE & CORNEILLE
READE, CHARITS
REE:D, JOHN
RENAN. ERNEST
RICHARDSON, SAMUEL
RODGERS AND
EIAMMERS’EEIN
ROSTAND, EDMOND
ROUSSEAU, IE AN JACQUES
RUNYON, DAMON
RUSSELL, BERTRAND
SAKI

SALINGER, J. D.

SALINCJER, J. D.
SANTAYANA, (,'EORGE
SCHOPENHAUER
SCHULUliRCi, BUDD
SHAKIuSIT.ARE, WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARi:, WILLIAM

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM

SHAW, BERNARD
SHAW, BERNARD

SHAW, IRWIN
SHAW, IRWIN
SHELLEY

SMOLl.ETT, TOBIAS

sopiiocle:s

SOPHOCLILS II
SPINOZA

STEINBECK, JOHN
STITNBECK, JOHN
STEINBECK, JOHN
STENDPIAL
STERNE, LAURENCE
STEWART, Gi:ORGE R.
STOKER, BRAM
STONE, IRVING
STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER
STRACHEY, LYTTON
SUETONIUS
SWIFT. JON\Tn\N

The Best of 247

The Republic 153

The Works of Plato 181

Selected Poetry and Prose 82

The Travels of Marco Polo 196

Selected Works of 257

Flowering Judas 284

Pale Horse, Pale Rider 45

The Captive 120

Cities of the Plain 220

The Guennantes Way 213

The Past Recai)tured 278

Swann’s Way 59

Tlie Sweet Cheat Gone 260

Within a Budding Grove 172

Six Plays by 194

The Cloister and the Hearth 62

Ten Days that Shook the World 215

The Life of Jesus 140

Clarissa 10

Six Plays by 200
Cyiano dc Beige; .ic 154
The Confessions of 243
Famous Stones 5^

Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell 137
The Short Stories of 280
Nine Stories 301
The Catcher in the Rye 90
The Sense of Beauty 292
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer 52
What Makes Sammy Run? 281
Tragedies, 2, 3 — complete, 2 vols.
Comedies, 4, 5 — com]ilctc, 2 vols.
Histones, 6 ) , ,

Histories, Poems, 75
E'our Plays by 19
Saint Joan, Major Barbara, and
Anclrocles and the Lion 294
The Young Lions 1 12
Selected Short Stones of 319
The Selected Poetry & Prose of 274
Humphry Clinker 159
Complete Cireek 'Lragedies, VoL III 312
Comjilete Greek 'Lragedies, VoL IV 313
The Philosophy of Spinoza 60
In Dubious Battle 115
Of Mice and Men 29
Tortilla Flat 216
The Red and the Black 157
Tristram Shandy 147
Storm 254
Dracula 31
Lust for Life 1 1
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 261
Eminent Victorians 212
Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188
Gulliver's Tr.ivtls and Odicr W^ritings

SYMONDS, JOHN A.

TACITUS
TENNYSON

THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THOMPSON, FRANCIS
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID
THUCYDIDES
THURBER, JAMES
TOLSTOY, LEO
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY
TURGENEV, IVAN
TWAIN, MARK

VASARI, GIORGIO

VEBLEN, THORSTEIN
VIRGIL
VOLTAIRE
WALPOLE, HUGH
WARREN, ROBERT PLNN
WEBB, MARY
WEIDMAN, JEROME
WELLS, H. Q.

WELTY, EUDORA
WHARTON, EDITH
WHITMAN, WALT
WILDE, OSCAR
WILDE, OSCAR
WILDE, OSCAR
WODEHOUSE, P. J.

WORDSWORTH
YEATS, W. B. (Editor)

YOUNG, G. F.

ZIMMERN, ALFRED
ZOLA, EMILE

MISCELL

An Anthology of Irish Literature 288
The Apocrypha 326
The Arabian Nights’ Entertain-
ments 201

Best Amcr. Humorous Short Stories 87
Best Russian Short Stories i8
Best Spanish Stories 129
Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. I 310
Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. Ill 312
A Comprehensive Anthology of Ameri-
can Poetry loi

The Consolation of Philosophy 226
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 94
Eighteenth-Century Plays 224
Famous Ghost Stories 73
The Federalist 139
Five Great Modern Irish Plays 30
Fourteen Great Detective Stories 144
Great German Short Novels and Stories
108

Great Modern Short Stories 168

The Life of Michelangelo 49
The Complete Works of 222
Selected Poetry of 230
Henry Esmond 80
Vanity Fair 131
Complete Poems 38
Walden and Other Writings 155
The Complete Writings of 58
The Thurher Carnival 85
Anna Karenina 37

Barchester Towers and The Warden 41
Fathers and Sons 21

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court 162

Lives of the Most Eminent Painters,

, Sculptors and Architects igo
The Theory of the Leisuit Class
The Acncid, Eclogues &. Georgies 75
Candidc and Other Writings 47
Fortitmlc 178
All The King’s Men 170
Precious Banc 219

I Can Get It P'or You Wholesale 225

Tono Bungay 197

Selected Stones of 290

The Age of Innocence 229

Leaves of Grass 97

r^orinn Gray, l)c Profundis 125

The PlaNs of Oscar Wilde 83

Poems and Fairy Tales 84

Selected Stones 126

Selected I’octry of 268

Irish Fairy and Imlk Tales 44

The Mechci 179

The Cireek Commonwealth 207
Nana 142

■ANl'OUS

Gicat Talcs of the American West 238
The Greek Poets 205
Stories of Modem Italy 118
A Kierkegaard Anthology 30^

The laitin Poets 217
The Making of Man: An Outline of
Anthology 149
Making of Society 183
Medieval Romances 133
The Modern Library Dictionary i
New Voices in the American Thcatie
258

Outline of Abnormal Psychology 152
Outline of Psychoanalysis 66
Restoration Pla>s 287
Seven Famous Greek Plays 158
The Short Bible 57
Six Modern American Plays 276
Six American Plays For Today 38
Twentieth-Century Amcr. Poetry 127

MODERN LIBRARY GIANTS

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THE MODERN LIBRARY GIANTS REPRESENT A
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G49. TWAIN, MARK. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

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G75. SELECTED WRITINGS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

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